A Long Walk in the Woods…

Nature teaches more than she preaches. There are no sermons in stones. ~ John Burroughs

In 2024 my daughter gifted me a small book, John Burroughs, The Gospel of Nature published by Applewood Books. The book is part of the American Roots series of books published by Applewood. It is a treasure that can be carried in your pocket as you take your walk in the woods.

Nature writing is an American tradition and we have many great writers who have each been inspired by this wonderful land we call America.

At present, however, we have leaders who look upon our most iconic landscapes only for the minerals or forests to be exploited for industry and profit. Many of our public lands are vulnerable today due to legislation signed into law by our current president and Republican party. The president has devoted most of his business career to exploitation of people and places. Now in this 250th year anniversary of our nation, we are understanding the full impact on the values we have enshrined as fitting – for our Republic. We as yet know whether the American psyche and will can withstand the forces of anarchy that currently pillage our natural and economic treasure. My own belief is that liberty and truth will win out. I just hope I live to see it.

To salve my broken heart I turn to nature. Below is a first draft of A Long Walk in the Woods, a memoir I am crafting which almost entirely based on the principle that the land where we live forms much of our character.

Introduction

It began in Tennessee.

As an infant “the woods” encompassed a living room, and my bare feet searched for purchase only months after my arrival. From there to the front yard, and much later to the street on a Schwinn bike. My paternal grandparent’s farm in nearby Watauga served as a touchstone. All the while my body stayed close to the soil, the trees and the miraculous creatures of ground, water, forest and air that delight youngsters who are awake to the Creation.

The Watauga House, still unfinished in 1906, was purchased for $600 when my grandparents were married. My grandfather and uncle finished the interior. Here it is today still maintained in its classic beauty:

I was born into a military family, so my adventures were destined to encompass “the woods” of a continent. For eight decades I’ve been in discovery of “woods” and curious about the humans who call them home. These stories are a memoir of hope and conviction that we can restore “the woods” when we realize we are a part of them.

Awareness of “woods” is present in the body as we grow up and all through our lives. Each infant comes equipped with knowledge of Earth begun in their Mother’s body, listening to the sound of her voice and the beating of her heart. All through gestation, a newly developing life gains greater awareness of interconnectedness, i.e. association, as life-sustaining and that awareness persists in us to our death. It may dull over a life in which a child is not afforded access to the greater scope of nature, and it can also be deaf or blind to the life-giving natural world by living in unnatural conditions. Parents must cultivate that essential knowing though wonderment and exposure. Every little person should touch Earth soon after birth. Feet in the warm soil, face in the sunlight and breezes, a garden of scents and color, or a puppy are delightful means to the know the “woods”.

Though I currently live in an urban environment, I consciously seek out little havens of nature and there are plenty: a simple window box of flowers, the deep grass in an unmown lawn into which we may roll in its cool embrace breathing in the scents of plant and earth. Other “woods” may be:

A bench on a trail in a botanical garden under shading trees;
A walk in an urban forest animated by birdsong or cicada choruses;
The wonder of farm, field and stream; a vibrant farmers’ market among neighbors;
The fragrance of upturned soil basking in the noonday sun in your garden;
The joy with friends on a golf course edged by trees; the feel of spikes penetrating the closely mowed green and the scent of rich earth underneath;
A long walk on the beach where white sails fly and skimmers dip and dine;
The lovely song of a Carolina warbler that cheers the heart;
Fishing along a stream, lake or ocean; plop of frog and buzz of dragonfly wings;
Light playing through water or rainbows sparkling across the mist from a sprinkler;
Rain on a hot day with the window open and the curtains afloat;
A teacup tidepool of hermit crabs and keyhole limpets on a rocky beach.

The fact is every living being is born of nature. We “recognize” its features, scents, and touch in myriad ways because we all belong to the same Mother. We are all made of the same “stuff”. Wherever I have resided for a time, there are perceptible Earth energies, no matter how much concrete may lay over it. That lovely little plant will find its way through a crack in the surface, or a tree root lift that sidewalk. I cheer my kin on!

20th Anniversary of D-Day with Walter Cronkite and President Eisenhower

There is a point in this video on the eve of D-Day when both Winston Churchill addresses the allied troops, and President Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) offers a prayer. (at 27 minutes into the film above) Listen to the language of democracy, of human compassion, of partnership – all that is missing in our current administration, so void of morality and honor. When Churchill refers to the U.S.A. he calls us “the great Republic.” It made me weep for what has been trashed by this government and a man of ill will and so little depth of soul. Then at the end of the video, after Chronkite and Eisenhower walk through the cemetery of the fallen, Eisenhower reflects on the reason the U.S. and its allies went to war: go to 1. 18.0 to listen to one of our greatest leaders.

Let this be our battle cry to gain back our Republic from the hands of thieves and demagogues!

Borrowing from Our Children’s Treasure

“A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” ~ Aldo Leopold

We see this phenomenon in the seven states who have been drawing down the Colorado River Basin water resources to the point of an emergency, and now in the proliferation of data centers in support of AI. In both cases large scale industrial projects drive decisions rather than prudent decision making with a land ethic (meaning the best decision making by a thinking community).

Citizens are finding themselves in a water crisis across seven states who utilize Colorado River Water, or in the fact that citizens in U.S. states are in a quandary as data center developers pressure them to either sell their homes or face the whine, pollution, grid and water overuse of mega data centers built in their backyards.

These kinds of abuses and overuses of the planet’s generosity occur without an ethic that all agree upon. Aldo Leopold made the greatest contribution to this discussion in his landmark essay, The Land Ethic. Leopold considered a land ethic as a dynamic outcome of a thinking community working together for the best outcomes for both the biotic health of the land and for people. The quote above sums up the concept.

When the Colorado River Compact, which includes seven states that utilize its waters, discussed how they could work together to share this great river’s resources, they did so in spite of a basic fact: the river experiences periodic one-hundred year droughts as shown in fossil records and tree rings.

Americans living in these states have witnessed a long-term drought that has all but emptied the two giant reservoirs, Lake Mead (lower basin states) and Lake Powell (upper basin states).

Desert states like Arizona and California, have sucked the regions dry to support enormous growth in cities and agriculture. Before building the Hoover Dam to create Lake Mead, Congressmen in 1878 sent John Wesley Powell to assess the southwest region for its potential for development of the western states. He returned after 18 months to deliver a sobering conclusion: the arid region is unsuitable for large scale development based on available water supply and geological aspects of the west. Read a summary of his report here.

Today, nearly a century later, mega-wealthy oligarchs who developed artificial intelligence (AI) want to build huge (thousands of acres) data centers to power AI. The horses are ahead of the cart again as the public isn’t sure they want AI to be developed without careful discussion and oversight. Virginia, a drought-stressed state, has hundreds of data centers clustered in the northern part of the state and are salivating for land in rural area. They bully landowners, promise huge tax income while drawing large amounts of fresh water from aquifers. The trend is to push out home owners, farmers, and even small townships, by offering as much as $12M an acre. Some owners are pressured when neighbors sell and leave other land owners whose homes, farms and enterprises are their treasures. Emissions from gas-powered turbines, noise pollution, and hidden impacts such as the water required to produce the power to run the data center are unsustainable and undemocratic. Read this recent executive summary of data centers pros and cons from CERES, a nonprofit that supports sustainable business solutions.

Ceres Report Drained by Data Download

What is missing is the values-discussion that Aldo Leopold described that is a dynamic process within a thinking community. It is an ongoing discussion that considers the health of the land when making decisions that could decrease its well-functioning. Read The Land Ethic Below. **This is one of the most downloaded files on my blog. People from all over the world read it. My own view is that no one from the scientific community has analyzed “how to live on a piece of land without ruining it” better than Aldo Leopold. See the Aldo Leopold Foundation located in Baraboo, Wisconsin for more about his legacy.

The Land Ethic_A Sand County Almanac Download

A life for our time…Margaret Chase Smith video

Today Heather Cox Richardson reviewed the life of Margaret Chase Smith and in particular a speech she made in the U.S. Senate during the time of the Red Scare in the U.S. when Joe McCarthy created fear and unfounded accusation of Americans whom the far right feared. Senator Chase Smith rose to deliver a clear and honest response, reminding Americans of our values and Constitutional obligations, especially the Rule of Law. This video is lengthy (about an hour and a half) but I recommend it. Few strong leaders can clear the hot rhetoric of politics run a muck, and Margaret Chase Smith met the moment. Get your hot tea and settle in to listen and consider who we need today to lead this country out of the miasma of our current political process.

Heather Cox Richardson’s Substack Account, Letters from An American, on Margaret Chase Smith.

Do we have a right to a stable climate?

Today on the Sam Matey-Coste Substack account – The Weekly Anthropocene – news and a record of how countries voted to uphold the right of people across the world to a stable environment is presented. The vote responded to a ruling by the International Court of Justice. Note below, the U.S. now joins Russia, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Israel, Liberia, and others, to deny that right.

A U.S.A. nonprofit supporting youth is working in state and federal courts toward a declaration of the rights of children and youth to a healthy, sustainable climate. Our Children’s Trust is a nonprofit worth following.

Listening to youth speak to their futures requires all of us to understand our inaction acts to decrease their life’s potential. No one would deny that to children, right? The children and youth are given top notch legal education and representation at no cost. Explore the website by state to learn where youth are applying pressure to achieve a sustainable environment for their generation.

I highly recommend the book, The Ecology of Childhood, How Our Changing World Threatens Children published in 2020. Barbara Bennett Woodhouse devoted her law career to the rights of children. (See Google Scholar for her published works.) Bennett demonstrates how the U.S. ranks low compared to other developed nations in the social safety net provided for our children. We talk a good game about how we love our children in the U.S. but, when studied, that proves to be false. Now, we deny them a stable climate as well?

Readers, it is my firm belief that Americans are misrepresented by the current administration which denies climate change and has turned our country back to increasing fossil fuel production and use. The momentum toward clean energy that just got started in the Biden administration has slowed as a result.

In Sam Matey-Coste’s Substack account you can learn about advancement in clean energy and environmental victories in countries around the world. I highly recommend him to all of you who need a daily dose of climate hope.

In the U.S. there is progress in clean energy development such as in Texas and California, but it is much slower than it could be – especially in the automobile industry where sales of electric cars have plummeted. And now that Trump has illustrated how vulnerable the fossil fuel industry can be, the U.S. is losing out and our children’s futures are even more imperiled as the Earth warms. Emissions from fossil fuels are the primary driver of climate anomalies and storms like we’ve recently experienced — fires like we’ve never seen, droughts across whole regions of the continent.

But, it is not just our children whom we imperil. We imperil the world’s children. Emissions do not stay in place but circulate around the globe. We are all responsible and must get back to representatives in government who are responsible, serious adults. The window of opportunity for Americans to gain access to free or cheap clean energy is attenuating.

How can this be true? We have historically been a nation of innovators. But here, oligarchs in tech have taken away our agency and made us prisoners of their outsized influence over our politics and thus our government. Data centers to support AI development are being shoved down communities throats. Who profits? Oligarchs.

Step Up!

Step into this path we are on to take back our country and get back on a path to innovation, clean cheap energy for All, and working alongside our allies across the world to obtain for youth and coming generations a safe, stable environment, a world of innovators and well cared for people. War is obsolete, and our people must have a say through our representatives as to whether we go on defense of liberty. DEFENSE. The Speaker of the House refused to bring a vote to the floor of the House of Representatives to end the Iran War.

This administration must be held accountable. We must stand for truth and for our children’s future.

This time in U.S. history will either be recorded as our undoing and defeat, or our finest hour. Which will history record?

Update: A Related Post – New Book for Hotter Times

Our Father and His B-29 Crew WWII

Dad, on the far right standing, was 24 and his crew were 18 yrs old to 23. They flew 35 combat missions in the Pacific Theater, including Low Level Bombing over Tokyo, Japan. Below is the Three Feathers B-29 painted for combat.

My sisters and I, our children and grandchildren are forever proud and grateful for the sacrifices of our parents’ generation. Both Mom and Dad came from modest income families, had suffered through their teen years in a depression that left them hungry and wondering what lay ahead of them. When Pearl Harbor woke a nation reluctant to enter the World War II conflagration, they all jumped into the entire country’s refitting and commitment to the war. We are ever grateful all they gave to make this world safe for us and for instilling in us the love of country, the willingness to step up as citizens to keep America safe and bubbling with hope and supportive of each new generation. Thanks to you, Mom and Dad. You are not forgotten. We take the baton and are carrying it along to keep our nation of equality and freedom safe from tyranny whether from without or within.

To all veterans, thank you! To those we remember, God bless you.

Irish Story Telling for Imagination

RX for the current morass of our social and political lives.

May Kate Corkery set your heart afire!

From the Poetry Foundation: William Butler Yeats

The Poetry Foundation

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

By William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

Copyright Credit: W.B. Yeats, “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” from The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems. (London: Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889.) Public domain.

Source: The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems (Kagan Paul, Trench and Co., 1889)

Be Well My Friends

How We See Each Other

“The hierarchy of caste is not about feelings or morality,” Wilkerson writes. “It is about power — which groups have it and which do not.” ~ Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson

America is beset with a wound of spirit. Slavery, or the subjugation of others based on skin color, origin – or any other arbitrary distinction -is an ongoing contradiction in our Constitutional lives yet to be resolved. Today, Black Americans are still struggling for equal representation. Now, with the striking down of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, are we back at the basic question: Do Black Americans have a right to equal representation in voting districts? We are at another make or break moment. Is the Supreme Court right that there is no longer a need for federal oversight of district maps in southern states which have historically worked to suppress the vote of African Americans?

Human beings can be vicious, murderous, and also kind and loving…and everything in between. We are a complex species with potential for good or bad. Our canon of law traces all the clever ways we try to obtain power.

For millennia, humans have sought distinctions that give them a false rationale, stemming their sense of guilt when taking what is not rightfully theirs. More advanced cultures are more tolerant, making judgements based on how people act in various situations.

Much of this wisdom of the ages was on the minds of our founders when we set out to establish a new kind of government based on equality. Yet, most of them owned slaves and denied poor whites privileges who did not own land. Over our history as a nation, Americans have subjugated and disparaged African Americans, Irish, German, Slavic, Italian and Chinese immigrants, and Native Americans. The Constitution and Bill of Rights, and ongoing adjudication in our courts, continues to refine how we live together and who gets a “slice of the pie.”

Listen to a scholarly discussion about the impact of the Civil Rights Act from the National Constitution Center.

Isabel Wilkerson explains in her landmark book, Caste (2020) that she set out to discover the origins of our discontent. In her lengthy study, interviewing thousands of people, the things that divide us the most are not so much color or gender but rather about who’s got power.

In a 2023 interview with Oprah Daily, she was asked about the banning of Caste from libraries across America. She responded, “In writing Caste, I had to do a tremendous amount of research into India and Germany during the Nazi era. The Nazis studied the United States’ Jim Crow laws in creating the Nuremberg laws. We are coming perilously close to the spirit of what they were doing in another century with the banning of books. It’s revisiting a past that we should never want to experience again.”

It seems to me that we are at a new juncture in determining whether a redistricting map achieves the goals of the party submitting it for review: to determine whether it serves to weaken the moral principles of a Republic to achieve a new form of government, i.e. an autocracy based on white male supremacy and Christian Nationalist ideology. Yes, it is a grab for power, but much more, right? It seeks to tamp down the voices of Black Americans who are seen as opposing white power and privilege which for centuries enslaved generations. Sound familiar? I think we are right back at Reconstruction.

What do you think? Please submit comments.

Resources:

National Constitution Center Civil Rights Town Halls on YouTube:

Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice: Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act

Scotus Blog

Brennan Center for Justice

How quickly we forget

When I was a teenager, I would ride my horse deep into the Northern California wilderness. I came of age living in big nature. Given California’s growth and development, that ride would now be impossible. Yet phylogenetically, big nature is deep in all of our psyches. So I began to wonder why we were so rapidly destroying it. Years later at my first job at the University of Houston, I was studying children and parents’ environmental views and values. I found the children knew what air pollution was; but when we asked them if Houston had a problem with air pollution, they said, “No, we don’t have pollution here.” At the time, Houston was the most polluted city in the United States. – Peter Kahn, Environmental Psychologist

Environmental Generational Amnesia (EGA) was identified by Peter Kahn when I was working as an environmental educator. It began to answer my puzzlement about why people could not see the degradation of nature over time.

Kahn explained this phenomenon occurs as each generation takes the environment in their time as the norm.

Now, in America, I am wondering if this phenomenon works with memory of a democracy. We take what is before us as what it has always been.

In Kahn’s recommendations to counter environmental generational amnesia he worked with urban planners, for example, to build in features that allow local residents to experience more robust nature in a built environment.

Could we do the same for each generation to remember and know the origins of our Republic by experiencing aspects of a democratic society through out our lives as The People. Our form of governance is dependent on robust citizen and representative action and participation.

We could start by considering how to identify fairness, developing respectful listening; teaching check and balance by designing situations where kids can participate in situations demonstrate how it works to protect representation, free speech, and other key characteristics of a democratic society.

I recall a teacher in high school who designed his homeroom to function in this manner. He did something else: he taught us the Latin and Greek derivation of many words in our language so that we could derive meaning from root words

Do you agree that a type of democratic generational amnesia may be a force that works to undermine democratic governance which is dependent on individuals possessing more than rudimentary knowledge (i.e. memorizing definitions).