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An Interview by Heather Hummel
Reverence and Work
An Interview with the Editors of Holding Common Ground: The Individual and Public Lands in the American West
I am homesick for the cheery chattering of quail and the spiked scent of wild onion. Perhaps, that is what drew me to the collection of essays, Holding Common Ground: The Individual and Public Lands in the American West. Many of the voices in Holding Common Ground tell stories that will stay with you for a long time; even if the details fade, the rich sense of awe, reverence and urgency lingers. There is a thread of redemption weaving through the stories, and occasionally, sad stubbornness. Collectively, these stories depict wilderness despite wounding: a natural world thriving under duress.
The landscapes that fill the pages are as varied as can be: desert missile ranges, newly sub-urbanized California shorelines, Palouse prairies, and old growth forests. Co-editor Paul Lindholdt says in the introduction, "Sharing these stories can help us find common ground over divisive land issues by giving human faces to contested public lands" (4). The collection offers templates for healing ourselves and the lands we love. These essays hold powerful reminders of just how intimately and reciprocally the land and people are integrated, and they provoke the reader to remain mindful of such connections.
I responded viscerally while reading some of the essays in Holding Common Ground. In particular, Harold Fromm's essay, "Full-Stomach Wilderness and the Suburban Esthetic," took me by surprise. In this essay he discusses his skepticism of dichotomies equating wilderness with purity and society with impurity. Even though he claims he is a non-believer of such dichotomies, he mentions that “it’s too late to save Phoenix” and continues on by saying a "realistic view" of his Tucson home might demand preparation for "its inevitable SanDiegoization" (38). My core ached and still aches at that flippant "inevitable SanDiegoization"—it identifies San Diego as the epitome of a throwaway urbanized environment—and seems to indicate the pure/wild land, impure/populated land opposition does exist after all. (I know well what San Diego lost, and still loses rapidly, in its urbanization: healthy riparian landscape, uncounted songbirds and song dogs, rattlesnakes and oak trees. But I also know what still lives (and thrives) in finger canyons and stretches of healthy hillsides. And I don’t want to believe it is “too late” for anything, especially restoration.)
Regardless, my response is exactly what this book solicits. In the foreword, Mitchell Thomashow writes that “An instructive strategy for probing the depths of moral action is to ask people to describe experiences that reveal the layers of their ecological identity” (1). Holding Common Ground is a solid reminder that we have work left to do.
I wanted to speak with co-editors Paul Lindholdt and Derrick Knowles to hear a little more about how these stories came together. They shared the comments below.
I.
Heather: How did this book come about? Did you see something missing in current environmental literature?
Paul: As I remember it, Derrick saw a copy of a book entitled Comp Tales--tales about teaching composition--and that inspired him to suggest to me a similar book on the environment: one that would be narrative and personal instead of academic and policy-oriented.
Derrick: That's pretty much how it happened. I'd never heard of a collection of personal stories from people working to protect wild places, and I felt like more people needed to hear those stories to be motivated to do something to protect their own special corners of the world. So I suggested the idea to Paul, and we ran with it.
Heather: How do we encourage intimacy with the environment in our classrooms and communities, despite the cultural paradigm of rootlessness?
Paul: Ah, mobility, the great foe of bioregionalism. I encourage it most recently by problematizing it. That is, I get the students thinking about the problems involved in connecting to place rather than the joys and rewards. That way, the concepts do not come off as too airy-fairy. I am also working on an invited article, entitled, "Gifts and Misgivings in Place," to a book of essays re: place studies.
Derrick: As a conservationist, I've been taking dozens of people out on outings to unprotected wilderness in the Colville National Forest in NE Washington for the past four years. Some of these people have never been out in a wild place before. We hike and work on trail maintenance and restoration projects and talk about conservation in the context of the places we're interacting with. These outings encourage intimacy with the natural world and put a personal face on often abstract and complex environmental issues. Anyone can take a friend, neighbor, or family member out to visit a local wildlife refuge, park, or natural area and get them started on a track towards intimacy with nature. We all need to do a lot more of that sort of thing in our communities.
Heather: The introduction exhorts the readers to develop an "ethic of care." Where do we begin?
Paul: Uh, by picking up the litter in a ditch, which is what one of my students did. This is a tough question, and I guess I address it in my classes by taking them into the field, particularly to nearby Turnbull. They need to see it to feel it; they need the sensory piece before the affections can ever come into play. Environmental education says, alas, that if we don't catch them by the age of 12, we never will.
Derrick: People need to get started in their own backyards by paying attention to the little things like what kind of birds, trees, and plants live there and why. If people don't even really know that these things exist, then how can we expect them to care about their demise? We all need to spend a lot more time outside simply paying attention to what's going on around us.
Heather: These essays encourage reflection (and action) on the part of the reader. As editors, did either of you notice change in your own relationship between self and place as a result of working with this book?
Paul: I now look much more closely at details--species, landforms, stream names, e.g.--and am testing out the idea that from details the big picture of place-connectedness may come into focus.
Derrick: When we started working on the book, I was very focused in my work on the immediate need to protect large tracts of native, biodiversity, which, in the American West, are mainly located on our public lands. While I'm still convinced that protecting our remaining wilderness should be a top conservation priority, the types of experiences our contributors write about really woke me up to the fact that most conservation-minded people are not necessarily motivated to action by the need to protect distant, threatened places; they're thinking first and foremost about the little chunk of wildness near their city or even in their own backyard. If we're looking to motivate people to take action, these stories point the way, and I've learned a great deal from them.
Heather: There are recurrent patterns of rhetoric throughout the book that turn the tables on the rhetoric that is used so frequently by our current government officials, terms such as "moral obligations," "morality," and "ethics." How was this book shaped by current events?
Paul: Speaking for myself alone, it was shaped by the rise to power of the wise-use movement, including those now leading the House and Senate.
Derrick: The so-called environmental movement has been losing ground on all sorts of fronts for years. So I think many people who have devoted their lives to conservation are starting to question the old way of doing business that doesn't seem to be working anymore. There are actually several recent pieces put out by national environmental leaders on the topic of the "death of environmentalism." There's a lot of soul-searching going on, and I think for me, this book was partially my way of exploring ways we can do things differently and communicate more effectively about our environmental challenges.
Heather: I am curious about the interweaving of so many diverse voices and landscapes. Did you struggle to choose and arrange the stories into a cohesive whole or did they naturally begin to echo and respond?
Paul: We began with epiphanies, as I remember and then we saw the victories and challenges taking shape from there.
Derrick: We identified epiphanies, challenges, and victories as three common categories of experiences people who are engaged in environmental work typically go through. We asked for essays rooted in one of these three types of experiences that unfold on public lands in the American West. The diversity of voices and places you mention is held together by this geography along with shared experience.
Heather: Whom would you like to read Holding Common Ground?
Paul: Policy makers, health care professionals, composition teachers.
Derrick: People who care about conservation but don't go any further than sending in their dues to the Sierra Club.
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