This year I was invited to be one of the speakers at Quaker Earthcare Witness‘ Annual Meeting, which took place last weekend in Bellingham, WA. The following is the script from my address.

Kathy Hyzy, Editor

The Stories We Tell Ourselves: Place Knowledge as an Act of Co-Creation

I want to tell you a story.

Last week I went to visit my aunt and grandma in southern Indiana. They live in Oakland City, in a rural part of the state just a few miles from where my grandmother was born and raised. And though I have never lived there myself, it’s an important place to me. I’ve moved many times in my life, but no matter where I’ve been, I have visited southern Indiana nearly every single year of my life.

This is a corner of the world that has experienced a lot of change. My grandmother turned ninety this year, and she tells stories of fishing in marshes and running through forests of shagbark hickory, gum trees, and other towering hardwoods. The land was a patchwork quilt of swampy bottomlands, woods, and small farms. Her family worked one of those farms. Her father made tea from sassafras roots he dug in the woods, and plowed the fields with a team of horses. The whole family gathered walnuts, hickory nuts, and pawpaw, the native persimmon fruits, come autumn.

In the years since then, the coal companies have marched across the landscape. According to the Indiana Geological Survey, nearly 35 million tons of coal are extracted from Indiana each year, mostly through strip mining. Technological advances after WWII made strip mining dramatically more cost-effective. And strip it they did, peeling back forests, even towns, in their quest. Oatsville, the place both my grandparents were born, disappeared under the dozer blade years ago, as did the woods in which she played. She tells me sometimes she doesn’t even recognize the landscape of the place she’s lived most of her years. Forests and creeks gone, contours changed.

My grandma has seven brothers, and nearly every one of them has had dealings with the coal company. Farmers don’t say no to extra income, and the coal company pays for the mineral rights. After a couple of years of tolerating a vast pit literally in your backyard, the coal company puts the soil back—the Reclamation Act requires they do so—and if you like, they’ll leave you with a nice fishing pond. If they want to mine under your house, they’ll buy the structure and pay you to build a new one. As a little girl, I fished many ponds like that with my grandpa.

But as my grandma knows, you can’t “put back” a landscape. Or can you?

I was on the last flight into their small regional airport, and my aunt is unable to drive at night, so she asked the neighbor to pick me up. Dixie greeted me at the airport with a hand-lettered sign and an 8X10 of a picture of me from my freshman year of high school. She is the wife of the director of the funeral home across the street from my grandma’s house. Stout, white-haired, born and raised in Oakland City, she talked a mile a minute—and texted her son on her Blackberry—the entire drive.

Most of the way she fretted about the poor signage on some highway construction along the way. “I tell you what, somebody’s gonna get killed there, that’s what. Somebody’s gonna get hurt real bad. That’s just terrible, nobody can tell were to go…” This topic wore out quickly for me, and it was a forty minute drive home, so I asked her what the construction was all about.

“Oh, some highway to connect Evansville direct to Indianapolis. It’s supposed to take fourteen years to build it, and it’ll save about ten minutes on trip to Indianapolis.” She didn’t sound particularly excited about the project, but as we took the off-ramp, Dixie fumed about the protesters who had blocked construction for a time. “You’ve got protesters for everything anymore. But why for this? You can’t stand in the way of progress.”

I wondered where those protesters had come from, and why. Recycling is somewhat mythical in that part of the country, and other forms of environmental awareness or activism are largely absent. I couldn’t imagine what might have been big enough to attract protesters. So I did some research.

I-69 is more than a link between Evansville and Indianapolis. Better known as the “NAFTA Superhighway”, it will connect Port Huron, MI with Matamoros, MX, enabling ever more efficient trade between Canada and Mexico. It has already been in the works for fifteen years, and protesters have been working against it all that time. The protesters who showed up in Oakland City to “evict” the local I-69 offices, and who blocked construction, did so because I-69 is slated to bisect the Patoka River Wildlife Refuge right along the same section of road we’d driven that night.

The Patoka River Wildlife Refuge was established in 1994. It’s currently around 5,500 acres, but will eventually be 23,000 acres of marsh and bottomland hardwood forest—one of the largest protected forests of that kind. Right now, the refuge map is a patchwork quilt of federally owned lands, mine leases, formerly mined sites, and private holdings.

Eventually it will wrap around Oakland City, stretch up to what once was Oatsville, and extend forty miles eastward along the Patoka River. The 300-odd species that call it home don’t care who owns what, just that it’s there. Bald eagles, the endangered Indiana bat, and the largest nesting colony of least interior terns east of the Mississippi all call it home.

It turns out the wildlife refuge is an easy half-hour walk from my grandma’s house. I walked there in the evenings, the road beneath my feet moving from asphalt to gravel, the houses and cornfields sloping down and giving way to acres of cattails and mud, and still waters dotted with bleached-wood snags reaching up to the blue September sky. Farther on, the woods closed in overhead, and it smelled like my childhood, that damp rot of deciduous trees. Gum trees overhead, small hickories—most of them were logged out years ago—sassafras, other trees whose names I knew as a child. It was beautiful.

I had known about the refuge for some time, but it never occurred to me that there might really be a way to have public access. I stood on its margins, wistfully looking in at the wildness. And yet all I had to do was continue on down the road, and there I was. I found a place where a short trail led to a fishing pier out into a huge marsh that stretched around a wooded point. “Snakey Point Marsh” my grandma called it.

I sat on the dock and watched as the sunset worked its magic. Four herons fished within my line of sight, and countless fish leapt for insects. Small flocks of ducks landed occasionally. In the distance, the setting sun turned the ever-present steam plume from the coal-fired power plant a rosy hue. And I cried for the beauty around me, cried for the hope I felt at seeing a landscape like the one my grandma had so often described to me.

It represented my idea of progress, the kind of progress that includes redemption. Progress that recognizes the value of a place and all of its inhabitants, not just its human ones. Right there, in southern Indiana, where there isn’t even recycling, where I least expect to find it.

****

Alison Hawthorne Deming is one of my favorite writers on place, environment and spirituality. She once wrote, “We are the ones who have thrown nature out of balance. We need no further evidence that this is the case. And we can no longer run away from the ruin in search of new wilderness—that great American story our ancestors carried with them from Europe. That story is over. We need a new one. Are we smart enough to reimagine ourselves? I don’t know. No one knows. This is the essential tension of our time.”

The two different stories of progress—the freeway and the refuge—are smack in the heart of that tension. What will the story be? What role do we have in crafting that story? Does your story need to sound like mine?

Storytelling is an act of co-creation: we tell the story to someone who listens, and in telling the story, we learn new truths about that story. We watch our audience, see their reactions to this detail or that. Our sense of the truth we are telling changes.

And if the storytelling works, the listener is changed by hearing the story—maybe not much, especially if they listen with their ears and not their hearts. So how do we get to the place where that relationship between storyteller and audience is an open, honest one? One where together we are moving toward a new truth? It’s a critical question to answer, because without that, without the “co” part of the creation, nothing will change.

One story I have been led to question of late is that of simple living as an effective means to reduce the planet’s excess carbon load. Before becoming editor of Western Friend, I studied environmental issues professionally and academically for over a decade. I spent a number of those years working on renewable energy issues, and I am intimate with industrial energy usage and industrial pollution issues. And I have calculated my carbon footprint, and whittled away at it from every possible direction. I have lived with continual guilt that I am not doing enough to save the planet.

And then there was this simple two-page essay in Orion magazine that finally told the story in a way that changed my perception. It’s an essay titled, “Forget Shorter Showers: Why Personal Change Does Not Equal Political Change” by longtime environmental activist Derrick Jensen.

In the essay, he makes quick work of the numbers: if everyone in the US did every single thing the movie “An Inconvenient Truth” spells out, we would only reduce carbon emissions by 22%–and we need to reduce them at least 75%. Consumer use of energy is only 22%, municipal waste production, only 3%. As Jensen says, I live reasonably simply myself, but I don’t pretend that not buying much, or not driving much, or not having kids, is a powerful political act, or that it’s deeply revolutionary. It’s not. Personal change doesn’t equal social change.”

In other words, the problem is the system in which we live. The industrial system, the industrial economy. We are a part of the problem only insofar as we participate in that system, and insofar as we tolerate it in silence. And we get that first part—we get that participation is problematic. I think we have a much harder time understanding how to effectively express our intolerance.

This is a brutal truth to absorb, I think particularly for Friends. Global warming, pollution, extinction—all of these issues are so vast and overwhelming, we want to be able to take action, we want to believe that fifty ways to save the planet really can save it. And simple living is so neatly aligned with our existing set of values—it almost automatically rewards us for what we are already inclined to do. And let’s be honest, who doesn’t enjoy feeling virtuous? There’s a South Park episode where someone drives by in a Prius, and it emits “smug” out the tailpipe. I drive a Prius, and I know what they’re talking about!

But if there is anything I am clear about when it comes to the global crisis, it is this: I want to be a part of its healing. I want to play a positive role in the transformation that needs to take place. Finally getting that my personal action isn’t enough to affect that transformation doesn’t mean that I’m going to stop riding my bike to work or eating a low-meat, locally-sourced diet.

But it shifts my understanding of what those actions do, and it makes me a lot kinder towards myself and others. Now that I’ve more or less stopped blaming myself and everyone around me for the destruction of the planet I love so dearly, there is room for forgiveness in my heart. Sure, I still wince when I see a Hummer driving down the street. I’m only human!

And what those actions do, those gestures of simple living, is of value on a much deeper level. They bring me in alignment with the world beyond humanity. When I plant tomatoes I’ve started from seed in my garden, I am taking part in the cycles of the natural world. It is a step toward erasing the unnatural separations between humans and nature. Buying food from the farmer’s market literally invests me in my community, enmeshes me in the place I live instead of letting it roll by as impersonal scenery outside my car window.

You’re probably thinking, yeah, that’s great and all, but how does your individual connection to your surroundings really change anything more than reducing your individual carbon footprint?

It puts me in touch with the abundance of nature, and of God. It shifts me away from focusing on the dire messages about environmental destruction, and my helplessness in the face of all those facts, and reminds me that I am an active participant in the world around me. That I am a co-creator, capable of effective positive change just as much as I am of contributing to the planet’s ruin. In short, it is empowering.

Abundance is a word that’s come up a lot in conversations I’ve had in the past few months. It’s a wonderful, rich word! It conjures images of overflowing buffet tables and smiling, dancing people. It’s a word, sadly, that I think many of us associate with the past. But that’s not where it belongs. Because what we continue to have in abundance is pretty amazing. We have in abundance our passions, our convictions, our ingenuity. We have access to that infinite source of love known as God, Christ, Allah, Light, the human spirit—whatever you call it, it’s the single greatest strength we as Friends have. And if simple living helps to keep me open to that strength, then it is well worth doing.

I’m part of a small group of women from several area meetings and churches who meet about once a month. Usually the host typically chooses the topic, and this month’s host happened to be the clerk of FWCC’s consultation on global change.

In case you haven’t heard about this already, FWCC is sponsoring a worldwide conversation among Friends about global warming. There will be regional cluster meetings, and probably in 2011, there will be an effort to bring the results of those conversations together in some sort of document. The committee charged with this work has written that “the purpose of the Consultation is to ask ourselves how our lives are contributing to the causes of detrimental changes, what actions we might take to live in right relationships as part of the global community and to discern what Friends have to offer to each other and to the world at large.  Underlying all our conversation is the understanding that as the Lord keeps and sustains us, so must we keep and sustain our Lord’s creation.”

So this past weekend, we spent some time with the queries FWCC is sending out to begin this conversation. I won’t read all of them to you, though you can ask me for them later if you like. But I do want to give you a chance to spend time with one of them:

How might we witness to the abundance God offers us and testify to the world ways in which justice and peace might abound in the face of significant disruption and tension?

So what does it look like to act from a place of spiritual abundance? How is it different from what we already do?

A friend recently told me a story that illustrates what it means to me to act from a place of spiritual abundance.

A group of Friends went on a tour of Latin America with Tony Campolo, the famous Christian evangelist and activist. On the tour, they visited a banana plantation, and were appalled at the human rights and environmental abuses they witnessed there. The group discussed what they could do about the situation.

What do you think you would do? You might write letters to your congressperson. You might boycott bananas. Or you might band together with several others on the trip and buy enough stock in the banana company to become shareholders, and then go to the shareholder meetings. That’s what this group of friends did. They showed up, they participated in the shareholder meetings, and little by little, they began to effect change in practices on the plantation.

That’s the extra step forward I want to be a part of. That’s the leap of faith into abundance that turns us toward healing.

I am not saying that we all have to be protesting in the streets, or gardeners, or shareholders—though maybe if we all found that strength, things would change faster! Just that we need to be compassionate, listen deeply, and find the way in which we are called to witness beyond simple living. In order to be strong, and to be effective agents of change, we need to act from our grounding in the source.

My own calling is to knowing my place. It is a calling that runs so deep within me that I can’t name a time when it wasn’t central to my life. By the time I was seven years old, I had taught myself all the edible plants of the Michigan woods, and most of the inedible ones. I started mushroom hunting with my grandmother before I was tall enough to carry the basket clean off the ground. Like many of you, I expect, most of my deepest spiritual experiences have occurred outside, in wildness.

Jennie Ratcliffe’s recent Pendle Hill pamphlet—which I recommend to you all—speaks to what I seek to do through intimate knowledge of the plants, animals, and ecosystem of which I am a part. She writes, “If separation and distancing are at the heart of our ecological—and thus human—predicament, then the restoration of integrity, in its deeper meanings of wholeness, the unity and sacredness of all that is, lies at the heart of its healing.”

And as an adult, I share my witness through writing and as a volunteer naturalist with the regional parks system. And let me tell you, when I go out in the woods with a group of kids—many of whom have never even seen a slug before, much less a deer or an osprey circling overhead, I see how quickly they absorb what I tell them about the different plants and animals we encounter. It’s clear to me that those few hours are among the most important ones of my entire life. I can watch these kids—and their parent chaperones, who are just as hungry for these experiences—I can watch them change before my eyes. They go home with stories about the cedar, the mother tree. They go home with an understanding of squirrels not as cute fluffy-tailed creatures, but as wild things who plant trees, feed coyotes, who live and die for a purpose.

For me it is a tremendous act of peacemaking. Naming is a powerful act of intimacy. Time and again, in nearly every faith tradition, every mythology, the first stories are about naming, and the power of naming. If you know your neighbor’s name, it’s harder to objectify them. And if you know your neighbor’s family, know the stories of how they came to be there, who they know, what they care about and why—if you enter into relationship with them, it becomes increasingly difficult to raise a hand in violence against them. The same is true of humans and nature.

I do believe what I do as a volunteer naturalist is part of the incremental positive change we so badly need. As author David Owen has written, “Real lifestyle changes, particularly when it comes to making environmental choices, are rarely permanent unless the are enforced by self-interest.” I believe intimate knowledge of your place transforms you into a part of it. It becomes in your self-interest to protect the places you know and love, because they are a part of you.

And I believe there are a multitude of ways to make a difference in the global climate crisis. My hope is that each of us seeks out our piece of the work. It may be policy work, it may be protesting in the streets, it may be educating others. But let it be work that sustains you in some way, and celebrates that abundance of love to which each of us has equal access.