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WritingsSarah Kokernot * * * After an early morning of chasing and tracking young elk with a group of wild life scientists, they, the other students, teachers and I go to a locally run greasy spoon for breakfast. When I sit down at the table, I immediately notice a painting of an elk bull on the wall facing me. The bull looks much like the ones we saw earlier, grazing in a meadow with the sunlight shining upon its face. Out of the corner of my eye, I glimpse more pictures on the wall to my right. There are two of them; one is a giant, charcoal colored crane in a coalfield taken from an aerial view. The other is a frozen cloud of gray dust exploding from a mountainside. Both of the pictures are proudly framed. Is this beauty to them? I ask myself. The thought unsettles me. I look at the picture of the elk again. There are other pastoral scenes like them; a foggy mountain landscape, a creek shaded by the warm colors of fall leaves. “This is what was taken from them,” I hear John Cox say. He’s a member of the elk team and has been talking with us about mountain top removal the past few days. “And this is what they have in its place. It’s what they have to be proud of now.” He nods towards the photographs of the coalfields and machine.
Coal mining is the bread and butter to many people in Eastern Kentucky. It is their past and their heritage, the myth of the coalminer father rising before dawn to work underground, risking his health and life in order to support his family. It is a story of sacrifice, black lung, back injury, workman’s comp, unions and strikes. The people have been exploited along with the land. Their struggle to maintain their rights and dignity is something to be proud of – but it is not the one framed on the wall.
What happens to people when beauty is stolen from them, and what they have to pride themselves by are the tools of its destruction? It implies that progress, capital, and industry are valued over quality of life, beauty, history, and the human spirit. There is something else lost than a mountain when a mountain is destroyed.
“Well, I guess so,” I carefully choose my words, afraid that I’ll get accused of being a bad environmentalist, “But I mean, the trash in the trash bags still has to go somewhere.” “Yeah, I know…it’s just the one thing that really irks me about this country.” “Yeah me too,” I say, and we begin are walk up the iron red road onto La Bufa. “But that seems so minor in comparison to the other shit that big companies and our government – (“Aren’t they one in the same?” Olivia cracks and we laugh) – put in the Rio Grande for instance, and then send it floating down the border. In comparison littering doesn’t really piss me off at all – which isn’t to say I think it’s ok. It just mostly bothers me because I don’t like walking past dirty baby diapers in the gutter every time I walk downtown. It’s just nothing next to an oil spill, you know?” “True,” says Olivia, and we stop for a moment to take a look at the city, tightly packed into the crater of the valley. I love it up here, especially at twilight. One by one the stars and streetlights turn on. For some reason the light from the town doesn’t block out the starlight too badly, so both the valley and the night sky glitter. The sounds of the parade drums, howling dogs, bullhorns, car stereos, fireworks, and ranchero bands echo up La Bufa. You can see and hear everything at once, and notice that the city has cohesion; its funny amoebic shape twinkling with fluorescent orange light and chirping noisily. The city oddly resembles a cell under a microscope. You can even spot movement through a network of cornels, a marching band winding, traffic entering the tunnels beneath pedestrian streets, a large truck heaving along the ring of road outside of town. Cities are alive and young. They haven’t yet learned the efficiency of a single celled organism. But I think they will. I think they have too.
I heard so many times in the course of my stay in Mexico, the voices of North Americans who were shocked by mainly two things: poverty and trash. What's interesting is how closely we associate the two. We tend to treat them similarly, pushing both trash and poverty into the periphery. Terms like “white trash” and “trailer trash” originate from the idea that some people are like garbage - they are expendable, useless, and to be removed from sight.
Sometimes I think it would be better for North Americans to live with trash in the streets just to see how much waste we are creating. We love for things to be clean – but really it's like hiding the dirty dishes under the sink. If we had to look at the mess we create each day, we’d do something about it. Of course, that is exactly the burden that comes along with paying attention to the world - it rouses feelings of responsibility, and people don’t want to feel responsible (or guilty, for that matter).
The North American tendency to trigger into action is one of our greatest strengths as a society. When we see a problem, we want to fix it. Although this can potentially lead to self-righteousness and meddling, our concern can lead to improvement in the lives of living beings.
In Guanajauto there are throngs of street dogs. At night you hear their howling echo through the valley of the city. You see them lying half dead, with their tongues out in the middle of the sidewalk, and tearing through plastic garbage bags to look for food. Some of them have terrified looks in their eyes when they see you coming, and others will walk right by you, minding their business, indifferent as any human stranger. I've never seen animals in worse condition than I did with some of the street dogs of Guanajuato. Although Guanajauto is a rich, middle-class city, the urban government has never taken preventative measurements to deal with the population of street dogs. When the dogs are captured, they are killed by being clubbed in the head because bullets and euthanasia are considered too expensive. There is no Mexican equivalent of the Humane Society, no government sponsored campaign to educate about neutering and spaying.
A few years ago an organization was founded called Amigos de los Animales, which has worked to rescue street dogs and sponsor education, and facilities, to sterilize the animals. The group is primarily composed of ex-patriot North Americans, although there are some Mexicans and people from other countries as well. The generally held opinion about the street dogs is “to let nature take it’s course”. The widely held opinion of most U.S. citizens, however, is that dogs are domesticated animals and therefore we have a responsibility to take care of them.
My friend Emelia, who is from Guanajauto, once told me that if a child falls down an old well in Mexico and is hurt, the well will still not be blocked up. It’s not that the people don’t care about the well-being of the child, but they consider it to be God’s will. This kind of acceptance of one’s fate is practically unheard of in main-stream North American culture; instead we want to act and improve upon what already exists.
But the inclination to act is counteracted by the architecture of tunnel vision. I say "architecture" because what blinds us from the peripheral is often the result of physical geography. Middle class life is compartmentalized by privacy fences, the metal cages of cars, houses without windows on the sides, the cul d’sac. One can drive through a zone of industry, or through the worn down houses of lower income neighborhoods without ever having to pay attention to them. Instead people put a heavy foot on the gas.
I grew up in a place where the normal confining, structures of social life were more transparent. I was raised in professional family living in a blue-collar area. My childhood home is five minutes outside of downtown Lexington on Versailles Road, in a house built when this part of town was in the country. My parents still live on the acre lot with a large garden and a medley of animals. Next door to our house is a halfway house for men with mental and emotional problems. Both of my parents are mental health practitioners, which I think explains their remarkable patience for all the nuisances caused by the neighbors to our left. The biggest problem was that they would throw trash in our yard; so we put up a fence on that side. A tall one. But they still keep throwing plastic bags, beer bottles, magazines – and once, a toilet – over the fence. You might be working in the garden or reading a book underneath the apple tree when a shouting match or schizophrenic screaming cuts the air. Sometimes when we mow the lawn we’ll find one of the men passed out drunk underneath the Douglas Fir that grows on the corner of our yard near to the sidewalk, next to their property. My mother wouldn’t let me play alone outside after dark because she was afraid one of them might be hiding in the bushes.
Across from my house is the Cardinal Valley neighborhood, where I used to play softball and go sledding down hills. And about a block away from my house towards town is West Minister Abbey, which are low-income apartments that used to be the projects back in the days of welfare. The bus from my high school would pass my house first and then make its stop across the street on the way outbound. But first, it would turn left at the overpass before Versailles Road turns into Maxwell and High. Underneath the overpass is the neighborhood that older Lexington citizens call Irish Town – which I always found to be peculiar since I never knew any Irish kid who lived there. For a couple of years I was the only white girl on my bus and stopping in the neighborhood considered by Cardinal Valley to be "ghetto-as-hell".
The funny thing was that my friends who lived in the more expensive (and more white) suburb of Palomar considered Cardinal Valley to be "ghetto and shady-as-hell". Recently, a friend of mine returned to Kentucky after attending Weslyan College in Massachusetts. He asked his dad, a resident suburbanite, to lend him money for the deposit for his apartment which was about a two minute walk away from my family’s house. His father refused, vowing that he wasn’t going to support his son living in a dangerous neighborhood. His father is an educated person, a professor at UK, with books by Chomsky and Marx flung about the den. I consider Cardinal Valley to be safer than my family’s own yard, but that’s only because I’ve been walking and riding my bike through it since I was a kid – and after the sunset at that.
There is ignorance because you don’t know, and ignorance because you don’t know any better. Like everyone, my friend’s Dad is abiding by certain ignorance simply because he doesn’t know. He doesn’t have the education to know otherwise. The place he lives in has not been educating him. His place is constructed in a way that serves as blinders to his vision.
Although blindness is an inevitability of the human condition, we can restrain ignorance by literally expanding out perspectives. The more we know about a place, the more likely we are to progress as a truly democratic society.
I wish I could say I had understanding of all those perspectives that I’ve had access to. Getting a sense of perspective about the world you live in is risky. You might risk your metal placidity of mind, and some formulaic prejudices about the way people work.
The first gravestones you see when you reach Flint Cemetery have detailed illustrations of peaceful, mountain hollows, cozy wooden cabins nestled at the foot of the hills, and human figures walking or dwelling in their version of paradise. Whatever country you love is its own paradise and no place I’ve seen quite holds the same affect on me than these hills, which are such a modest landscape in comparison to the Rocky Mountains or the staircases of clear blue waterfalls in Chiapas, Mexico. I can understand the visions of heaven represented in the gravestones, and when I look up into the surrounding countryside I expect for a moment to see that vision represented before me, but I am shaken out of my quiet reverie by the beeping and crashing of bulldozers. Even more shattering is the tear in the landscape where bald patches of exotic grasses and rock lie among the waves of green, forested mountains. I have arrived at the tower of a fortress to find that an oncoming army surrounds me. For a moment, the world is ending.
In our culture, places of the dead are balanced by reminders of life; are virtual gardens. The Lexington Cemetery is overflowing in the springtime with cherry trees, tulips, the new green leaves of poplars and willows. There is a large pond where children come to feed ducks. But in Flint Cemetery death is not greeted by new life, but by the lingering presence of destruction.
When I first arrived at Berea College’s Ecovillage, I walked past a glass building filled with plants which I assumed to be a greenhouse. Later I learned that this was their sewage treatment plant - or as they call it, “The Ecomachine”. The interior of the glass building is a few degrees hotter and more humid than the outside. The climate is perfect for the wetlands plants which flourish in large, white plastic barrels. They are responsible for the second stage of the treatment process, removing the organic nutrients from the toilet water. In the first phase of treatment, the sewage is stripped of odor producing materials and then neutrals. As a result, the greenhouse has a fecund, earthy scent from the plants, like a garden. There is also a mural of mermaids in an under-seascape painted on the giant canister which holds the treated water, prepared to be reused again in the Ecovillage toilets. The Ecomachine must win the prize for the most pleasant sewage treatment plant in the country. The Berea Ecovillage is one of at least twenty communities in the U.S. which seeks to conserve and produce it’s own energy. The Echomachine is one of the many examples of the designs to create an environmentally sustainable level of consumption. All of their energy is produced by the sun, and the houses are built in such a way as to conserve as much energy as possible. Ecovillage is also designed to facilitate a sense of community among it’s inhabitants. There is a large, open green space down the middle of the path between the houses where neighborhood children play, and also a common building shared for meetings and events. The houses are built in the town house style, each with a patios conjoined to their neighbors and trellises where vines will eventually climb to produce shade in the summer. A cooperative community is what makes Ecovillage works so well. It is not coincidental that the community is healthy as is its immediate environment. I have difficult envisioning the principles of sustainability at work in a urban sprawl neighborhood. The model of Ecovillage is conducive for inhabitants, not residents. Instead of being isolated by technology, they are united by its clever application. Sustainable communities to work what David Orr calls “inhabitants”. "A resident is a temporary occupant...As both of cause and effect of displacement, the resident lives in an indoor world of office building, shopping mall, automobile, apartment, and suburban house, and watches television an average of four hours each day. The inhabitant, in contrast, 'dwells', as Illich puts in an intimate, organic, and mutually nurturing relationships with a place....A resident can reside almost anywhere that provides an income. Inhabitants bear the marks of their places, whether rural or urban, in patterns of speech, through dress and behavior...Historically, inhabitants are less likely to vandalize theirs' or others' places. They also tend to make good neighbors and honest citizens. In short, they are the bedrock of the stable community...(130)." The irresponsible destruction of the natural world seems to have at least partially evolved from the human experience of displacement. Simply put, if we do not feel that we belong to a place, we do not feel responsible for any place. If a inhabitant is one is more likely to treat their environment conscientiously and carefully, than it serves that cultivating a sense of place among people is environmentally responsible. We have arrived at a time where the technological possibilities to work with nature instead of against it are filled with potential to lower the competition of resources among ourselves. If we acted responsibly to our environment, using renewable energy resources for instance - would there be a war fought in oil rich countries by now?
If human being are of the earth, then wouldn’t human beings represent at least one evolutionary will of the earth. Does evolution hold the answers? Should we really trust nature, which has created human beings who are destroying that - the very substance by which they exist? Human beings, as keystone predators, will continue to use up resources at a destructively, unsustainable rate. At some point, we are going to consume so many resources that our own lives will be jeopardized. Unlike other predators, we have a reasoning ability to choose. We can either amend our behavior and use inventive, technological ways to support our survival living with the environment, or we can continue to consume until we have nothing left. At this point in human history, some people have the foresight to predict this evolutionary crossroads and are taking actions and precautions to preserve and sustain what they can.
Liminal space is a term used by archaeologists and anthropologists to describe space which is “in between”. Such space can be representative of the realms between the physical world and the spiritual (such as cemeteries or ritual spaces), or between that which is socially acceptable and that which is disorderly (such as trash heaps, or borders on the wilderness). I am drawn to liminal spaces because I often feel they reflect the psychological space where I live. Like other modern humans, my civilized mind is making daily compromises with the wild one. Gary Synder says it in his essay, The Etiquette of Freedom. “The involuntary quick turn of the head at a shout, the vertigo at looking off a precipice, the heart-in-the-throat in a moment of danger, the catch of the breath, the quiet moments of relaxing, staring, reflecting – all universal responses of this mammal body (16).” Although I may have the initial, primal urge to bolt when I startle from the honking of a horn, my experienced social mind then determines the sound as a signal to look up and calmly maneuver through the cacophony of traffic. The tension that is created by this relationship is exhilarating and unnerving. Life has always been uncomfortable and stressful - but the human mind has not yet evolved to fully cope with the complex stressors and stimulators of contemporary culture. We continue to respond to industrial confusion with animalistic reactions before rational ones. It is interesting and exhausting. Because I am an individual prone to interpret the world in terms of place, I look for reconciliation of those psychological tensions in places which mirror them - a tree growing around a car engine, a mountain stripped naked by a machine. Who is going to win this battle? Sometimes I would like to think it's wrong to look at humankind's relationship to the environment as a battle - maybe it's more like a gestation phase. I still remember reading in my intro-biology textbook that a fetus is in competition with its mother for nutrition. If the fetus overtakes too many nutrients, than the mother will die, and eventually so will the fetus. If the mother uses all of the nutrients, then the child will die inside her, and put her also at risk of dying. But she has the chance of living and producing another offspring which will be able to compete. This relationship isn't exactly balanced on both end - the situation is far more detrimental to the fetus. I use this situation at the risk of relying on a tiresome cliché - but it is evident that we need the Earth far more than the Earth needs us. If, on the wider perspective of deep time, this battle is really only competition, what sort of new life will spring if gestation and birth are successfully accomplished? What kind of human must we become in order to survive? Somewhere along the way, civilization made a fault line in our thinking about the mind and body. I won't waste time inquiring to whether it has helped or hindered us more - frankly there is no turning back and I'm not willing to give up antibiotics. The traditional, civilized, European way of seeing it is as though the mind is the driver of the unruly, problematic, vulnerable body - an animal needing to be tamed and broken. The conceptual split between the two harbors resentments like two old feuding families, one is always conspiring on the other, the mind has nightmares of the body rebelling, the body cripples under urban negligence, sedentary lifestyles, and the mental pressures of the capitalist work place. But indeed it is true that the body wants to rebel - it desires, wrinkles, hemorrhages, diseases, dies, aches, pains, orgasms, tickles, tastes, satiates, delights. The body is a mess. People who are overwhelmed by suffering want to quit the body, “transcendence” it’s often called. I’ve been in such moments of physical pain that in desperation I would willfully abandon sensory faculties to stop it. Not death - just life without a body. Perhaps this is why some religions sigh at relief at the thought of death - life without the body - life without pain - imagine that! Could a mind know pain without a body? Could a mind know pleasure? But if the mind is the body, well what then? I don’t think that the European operation to remove the mind from the body has been a successful one. Words such as “disembodied” and “displaced” are simple, deceptive tricks of the operation. We are always in a place, we are always in the body - but we are not always mindful of where we are. I like to be reminded that I have a body. As strange as that sounds, I think a lot of people - and a lot of women in particular - rarely experience the delight of having a body. I profoundly feel the body when I am outdoors. It doesn't particularly matter if I'm walking or lying in a hammock - it will occur if there is enough quiet, if there is the wind and the abundant smell of growing and rotting life - being outside triggers some memory that my body is wild. There is nothing indefinite or liminal about it.
I am running on the sand road behind camp at Robinson Forest. The road is packed tight with rain water. Each step sounds with a soft, padding noise. I haven't been running in a long time and I can tell by the ache of my calves. Instead I focus on all that which I am passing. A king snake lies dead at the entrance of the woods and throngs of flies swarm around the carcass. I see tall red flowers in an open area. I begin to hear the stream trickling and gurgling past me. Dapples of light quiver on the road amid shadows of Poplars and Broad-Leaf Magnolias. I step over the fleshy, pine cone shapes of pink Magnolia buds. I hear myself breathing heavily when something large and swift darts away through brush on the other side of the creek bed. I seem to have reached the part of the road the butterflies like best. First there are a few Red Admirals dancing here and there among the Jewel Weed and Jack-in-the-pulpit. Then I come across a fleet of Yellow-Swallow tails, mining the salt off of Coyote scat. They hear my padding footsteps and the air erupts in a flight off saffron yellow. There seem to be dozens of them. I don't stop and count. I keep reaching each step past the fork in the road to what feels like a mile and then keep going a little longer. I run until I don't feel like I can go anymore, and then I run faster. I stop and feel the weight of my feet sink into the sand road, slick with sweat my skin feels like that of a frog, lungs open, calves feel hard with muscle - this is my body - I turn back to where I came and see my footprints. This is my body - I am alive, aren't I. Why would I want to abandon this? What coward decided we should all throw the body away? Like it was an old car, or a empty can.
And as for pain? "To be truly free one must take on the basic conditions as they are-painful, impermanent, open, imperfect-and then be grateful for impermanence and the freedom it grants us...The world is nature, and in the long run inevitably wild, because the wild, as the process of nature, is also an ordering of impermanence (Synder, 5)." In the end, the body will always win the argument. |