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By Simmons Buntin, February 16, 2010 4:07 pm

The Chain Letter of the Soul: New and Selected Poems
by Bill Holm
Milkweed Editions, 2009

By Claudia Broman

Death eventually comes knocking, but before it does, a person might as well pass the time writing poetry. Bill Holm implies as much in “Ars Poetica,” one of his many until-now-unpublished poems included in The Chain Letter of the Soul, printed and posthumously distributed by Milkweed Editions in October 2009 after Holm passed away unexpectedly earlier that year from pneumonia.

Along with new work by Holm, The Chain Letter of the Soul recounts treasures from some of his previous works, The Dead Get By With Everything, Boxelder Bug Variations, and Playing the Black Piano. The book itself is named after a phrase in an application Holm made to the McKnight Foundation to support the time he spent crafting his final batch of new poems: “I have written and intend to continue until someone among you takes up the happy work of keeping the chain letter of the soul moving along into whatever future will come.”

Serendipitous and poignant, many of the poems track Holm’s own emotional negotiation of life, death, and infinity. Through images steeped in landscape, people, wildlife, technology, and music, he questions why death is difficult to accept, what mundane day-to-day moments can teach, and what it means to be human. Take the outset of one of the last poems he wrote, “I Began the Day in My Sixty-Fifth Year,” in which Holm says he asks “himself questions that nobody else has bothered to ask.” By sharing these intimate exchanges with readers, Holm seems to have understood – even if intuitively – how his creativity would continue to resonate much farther than his own abruptly ended life.

The Chain Letter of the Soul is an appropriate entry point for those unfamiliar with Holm, and it offers touching closure for readers already acquainted with his work. The book holds nearly 100 previously unreleased poems, well worth the investment, even though the end of the “Storm Coming to Seattle” section seemed a bit rushed. Please consider The Chain Letter of the Soul as highly recommended and especially so while enjoyed aloud with Mozart or Beethoven, preferably performed on piano, playing in the background.

~~~~

Claudia Broman lives in Ashland, Wisconsin. Her poetry has appeared in Writing Nature: An Annual of Fine Nature Writing and Drawing.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 9, 2009 7:00 pm

By Shelly Yarbrough

Mike Parham, the IUSD board member responsible for prompting the school district to retrofit with solar.

Anyone who ever watched Housewives of Orange County knows that people in that upscale community have a lot of money to spend on just about anything they want.

So plunking down a few millions bucks for solar panels should be no problem for the school district in the heart of Orange County, the Irvine Unified School District, right?

Wrong.

Despite the high living you might see on television dramas and reality shows, the IUSD is pretty much like every other school district in California. The money is dried up.

So when IUSD board member Mike Parham decided his district needed to go solar, he also knew it would have to be at little or no cost to the district.

“We knew the price of buying and installing solar was coming down, and the incentives were at an all-time high, so there was no reason to wait,” Parham said.

Low cost was good. No cost was better, so that is what Parham and his district did.

Earlier this week, the IUSD voted unanimously to go solar on each of its 21 schools, selecting SPG Solar and Sun Edison to build and finance the project. All at no cost to the district.

This is not a charity thing. Or a giveaway. It is a sound business deal made possible by tax incentives on the one hand, and a sharply decreasing cost of buying and installing solar panels on the other.

Here’s how it works: Schools, of course, do not pay taxes so tax breaks are of little interest to them. Enter SPG Solar and SunEdison.

What they do is rent the roofs from the IUSD, build the system, create the power, then sell it to the schools — just like a utility might. With one difference: it is cheaper. Way cheaper. From seven to 20 percent cheaper.

And over the 20-year life of the deal that comes to more than $17 million, says Tom Rooney, president of SPG Solar.

For all you gear heads out there, “this project will generate over 6.6 million kilowatt hours of solar energy per year,” said Dylan Dupre of SPG Solar. “Over the life of the project, this will remove 127 million pounds of CO2, the equivalent of removing 12,000 cars from the road for one year.”

But as good as the finances are, what really has school board members such as Parham excited is what is happening in the classrooms. IUSD is developing a curriculum that takes full advantage of all the information its solar system is creating.

That includes lessons in science and math of course, but also business, finance and even art.

“Our responsibility is to squeeze the most out of every dollar, and to provide the best education possible with those limited resources,” said Parham, who in addition to being nationally recognized in the field of renewable energy for schools is also an investment banker. “Students, who will one day run this country, should learn about the viability of solar (and wind) energy, in order to be well-prepared for the job market of the future.”

Thanks to Parham, the people of Orange County are still getting whatever they want. Only this time they are making money from it. Go figure.

~~~

Shelly Yarbrough is a member of the Val Verde School Board in Riverside County, California. She is also a member of the Board of Directors of the California School Board Association.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 6, 2009 6:28 pm

By John Seager, President, Population Connection

As world leaders convene the Copenhagen climate talks, discussion has focused on the need for wealthy countries to reduce emissions. Far less attention has been paid to the inevitable reality that emissions in the poorest parts of the world need to increase. And there has been scant recognition of the role played by rapid population growth in rising emissions worldwide.

President Obama is taking a bold first step in Copenhagen by putting forward an ambitious emissions target for the United States. Yet global population growth threatens to undercut — even cancel — all progress. Global population may grow by 18% or more from 2005 to 2020, according to UN projections.

Reducing carbon emissions is actually three separate but related challenges. First, we must reduce global emissions. Second, we must slow population growth by supporting programs such as voluntary family planning. Third, we must recognize that about half the world now suffers from “carbon starvation” and needs to increase emissions.

Historically, as population has increased, emissions have also risen. Most emissions reductions must occur in wealthier countries since that’s where they are highest. At the same time, in order to give billions of poor people a reasonable quality of life, emissions in some parts of the world must increase significantly. Rapid population growth makes this balancing act even more difficult.

Given available technology, the often-tiny carbon footprints of billions of people are both a cause and an effect of impoverishment. The one billion people who struggle to survive on less than $1/day use very little in the way of fossil fuels. And the additional 1.6 billion living on less than $2/day hardly use more. In order to have decent lives, they must increase their emission levels substantially, despite advances in green technology.

Much of sub-Saharan Africa is mired in the most desperate, grinding poverty imaginable. Governments there are already unable to meet the most basic needs of their citizens. And it is these people — who contribute least to climate change — who will suffer most from the problems that climate change brings. Women especially will face new challenges to their health, livelihoods, and even their lives.

Africa’s per-capita emissions must increase. But, if Africa’s population grows by the 39% that is projected by 2020, it will be nearly impossible to create a healthy quality of life for people in that part of the world.

Population growth will undermine all efforts to achieve lower carbon emissions unless investments in clean energy are matched by equally comprehensive investments in universal access to contraception along with other health and development programs.

As we develop hybrid cars and the like, what about the other half of the world? Will they be left to sweat and starve while we glide forward into a century of renewable energy? Their carbon footprint needs to grow. That can only work if we are willing to meet the population growth challenge.

This is one of those times — and one of those issues — where we need to keep our eye on multiple goals. Reducing emissions is an energy issue. But it is also in equal measure a human rights challenge, one that must include unprecedented investments in a full spectrum of reproductive health services for women and couples. Worldwide, 200 million women have an unmet need for family planning. And demand for contraception is projected to increase by 40% in just 15 years.

If we fail to act on this broader agenda, initiatives for reducing greenhouse gases will be swept away by a tidal wave of population growth. The White House has already made great strides in reversing the pernicious policies of the Bush Administration which turned a blind eye to the needs of billions. But additional bold action is needed.

No doubt President Obama is keenly aware of the multiple dimensions of the climate challenge. Yes, it’s about energy. But, more than that, it is about meeting the basic human needs of soon-to-be seven billion people. Universal access to family planning must be a centerpiece of the climate change agenda in Copenhagen and beyond.

~~~
John Seager is president of Population Connection, America’s grassroots population organization. He was formerly with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and also served as chief of staff, communications director and district director for U.S. Representative Peter H. Kostmayer (D-PA). He holds a BA in Political Science from Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

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By Simmons Buntin, December 2, 2009 7:43 pm

Writer, photographer, and landscape designer Scott Calhoun.

Terrain.org editorial board member and landscape writer Scott Calhoun lists his Top 3 gardening books of the year:

For the last two years, I’ve sat on the American Horticultural Society’s Book Award Committee. This means that each week in November and December, two or three or six gardening books show up in my mailbox or on my doorstep to review, peruse, and ultimately judge. In fact, while I was writing this, the UPS man interrupted me with the delivery of a new memoir by a Canadian poet-farmer: Trauma Farm: A Rebel History of Rural Life. I got diverted and just spent 15 minutes reading the first chapter. For someone crazy about plants, words, and photos, exploring these books is a treat but also a task I take seriously.

After receiving the books, I give each one a general once-over, read the introductory material, table of contents, and first chapter. If I’m compelled to read on, the book makes it into my “for further review” pile, which after a complete read eventually gets whittled down to a top 10 list. Last year, most of my finalists (and many of the winners) were large format hard-bound affairs crammed with luscious full-bleed photos, plant lists and other useful information in mostly photo-driven formats.

This year, the quality of the writing and depth of the research is shining through and my top three selections thus far contain no photographs whatsoever.

Read the full entry at Scott Calhoun’s blog, Scott Calhoun’s Desert.

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By David Rothenberg, November 6, 2009 4:31 pm

In October, just after appearing at Terrain’s launch event at the UA Poetry Center, David Rothenberg went off for three weeks aboard a hundred year old Dutch schooner to sail around the Arctic archipelago of Spitsbergen with fourteen artists on a project known as The Arctic Circle, www.thearcticcircle.org

October 6th, Longyearbyen 78.2° N, 16°E

Last Sunday I walked the lonely streets of Tucson, city in the desert. It was a hundred and five degrees and no one else dared go out. One week later I am 78° N in the Northernmost place in the world reached by regular air service. It is 15° and snowing heavily. The white mountains have that looming arctic shape, where the base melds into the sea and the summit dissolves into cloud, with the middle stages of black on white like some giant illegible hieroglyphic. The world is like this, we are privileged to be able to leap from one climate to the next with ease. It is always much bigger than we are, and impervious in its beauty. That is the terror of the sublime.

In between I stopped to climb the marble slopes of the new Oslo Opera House, a great white building forged out on the shore of the most populous of Norway’s fjords, a spot always raw and under construction. It is meant to be the North’s answer to the great curved shell’s of Sydney’s opera, and with its white blocks of carefully hewn rock it does not disappoint. It is an artificial mountain by the shore from whose summit one can see distant real mountains, a pilgrimage site of the future, when this city will one day be beautiful.

Opera House

We are building a world that will never compete with the vastness of Arctic ice. The names of the folding coastline are unpronounceable and long, the archipelago of Svalbard is full of towering peaks and unreachable canyons hardly ever touched by human feet. It seems endlessly beyond the range of our ability to impact but it is all in danger. The bears and whales grow toxic as their food concentrates all we have dumped into the environment, we are taught to weigh sadness as we learn all this beauty is melting away.

But nature remains more than anything we can do to it. One hundred, one thousand, one million years. It is nothing in the grand scale of time. We are fourteen artists sailing on a hundred year old schooner into rough and windy seas, with as many computers, cameras, recorders, devices, none of which can capture anything of the rich majesty of the world. We are supposed to possess special eyes, ears, and vision to be able, in our own ways, to represent some fragment of this beauty to help change the way people may see. It is an impossible task, but it is the least we can do since we have come this far.

October 8th, Fourteenth of July Bay, Krossfjorden, Spitsbergen 79.2° N 12°E

We are fourteen artists, two scientists, and a crew of four sailing as close to the North Pole pack ice as we can get away with. Aboard the M/S Noorderlicht, a hundred-year old Dutch schooner, we left Longyearbyen one week ago in the Norwegian territory of Svalbard, the most northerly point in the world with regular air service, for several weeks traveling the Arctic through open sea and sheltered bays, stopping along the way to respond to the landscape in uniquely artistic ways.

Ship and Land

We have been out two nights, and already we have met a phenonemon of nature that cannot be captured in an image. The aurora borealis is a beautiful piece of natural performance art cannot be easily filmed or photographed. A time-lapse photo reveals only fuzzy colors, and a moving image cannot get enough light to capture the dynamic strangeness of it all. The Northern lights have been painted as hanging, shimmering curtains of multicolored fire, and old engravings show an imaginary fierce luminosity that wants to leap from the page into our minds. Computer enhanced contemporary images recreate the experience, but they too seem unreal, like motion-capture animation.

Rarely has a boat like this had so many hard-drives and up-to-the-minute cameras, with hundreds of images snapped and recorded, set immediately on to the great download of analysis and processing. The artists are all at work, puzzling, thinking, figuring out how to get beyond the two extremes: pure documentation, and blatant irony. “I will take a picture of me on the ice in a black suit, with flashlights on an armature illuminating my face,” says Tomas from Croatia. “It is an ego trip, I know.” A statement, a point. We don’t want to be seen as tourists, but of course we are tourists. Art tourists at the end of the world, trying to describe what will always be greater than any description.

I am afraid of voicing my own rather conservative musician views. It matters not to me what is or is not art, but what is good art or bad. Or more easily, what is better of worse. You gonna wear a black suit on the white ice? All right, tell me the better or worse ways of wearing that suit, surrounded by a crown of flashlights. Wear that suit like you mean it, not to make me laugh. It is too beautiful out here to laugh at, but I am always ready to laugh with you, not at you, or your work.

It is the aurora that makes me more than smile, but open my mouth into an astonished “O.” I have seen it many times before but it is never less beautiful or surprising than before. We can make art out of it but we cannot ever replay it. The images we snap and flash can only be the starting point. Better to think of auroras and set up one’s own arctic lights of the night, as did light installation artist Raphaele Shirley:

Light installation by Raphaele Shirley.

I remember the eighteenth century, and the notion of the sublime. That quality in nature that leaves us in awe because it is always beyond the fact of our gaze, the extent of our reach. We are as small as it is great, as we seem hardly to make any mark upon this grand arctic expanse. The sublime, said the philosophers, is not as fine as the beautiful, because it impresses us because of how giant it is, and how impossible to touch. Beauty, instead, must be something more, something we can choose to contemplate, rather than be always humbled by.

And yet this giant beauty today seems ours to pollute, to warm, to melt out of existence. We must honor those facts of nature that are greater than any ability of us to destroy, or ignore. The force of the wilderness smacks us across the face, and its grandeur must always burn, in our hearts, in our thoughts.

October 9th, Sallyhamnen, 79.7° N 11.2°E

Today I played my soprano saxophone aboard the zodiac as we motored close to the whiteblue tongue of a glacier. The scene was being filmed by Italian artist Andrea Galvani for a giant photograph he would later print at a gigantic size from an old 4 x 5 single-load film camera. “This digital image,” he says, “is like a Polaroid for me.” I was wearing his Muji raincoat because it looked much more cool than my own high-tech gear. Everything was black. The boatmen lay down on the floor of the zodiac so we wouldn’t be seen, making it look like I was out there all alone. A wire ran from my saxophone into the sea to make it look like I was playing right into the water, down to the hydrophone to broadcast my sound to any whales who might be listening below. I have done this many times before but this time, as winter approaches, there are no whales in the fjord.

David Rothenberg plays in the fjord.

The lone saxophone tones echoed off the stark mountain walls. Once I figured out the length of the reverberation I could time my phrases so a minimalist rhythm could be formed by the bouncing of the sounds off the two mountains. The echo turned time into space and made this one little instrument beat into the sides of the landscape, a golden reflection dancing off the descending light. Snow continued to fall, beginning to collect on the bell of the horn and the floor of the boat. The photographer was shouting instructions at me from the kayak as it faded away into the mist. All became soon invisible, I forgot where I was and who this music was for. A fulmar shrieked. A bear roared in the distance. He climbed into the still green water and started to swim.

October 10th, Moffen Island, 80°N, 14.5°E

From this completely flat island on the horizon we see nothing, as if we are deposited in some alien sea. It is strangely warm and moist, nothing like the endless winter one might imagine at the end of the road of darkness. Through September it is forbidden to land on this island in case breeding walruses and seabirds might be disturbed. By October the law permits us, and it is now possible to walk right up to huddled walruses and tap them on the shoulder, inject them with tranquilizers, and take a sample of something. But we’re not scientists, so we don’t do that, though we do approach close enough to feel their eyes looking right at us, squinting, trying to see something of interest. Eye of the walrus—doesn’t sound as romantic as ‘eye of the whale,’ and I don’t know how humans have been changed or touched by it.

The tiny human forms traipse across the white landscape, looking for something, as always, an idea, a creative spark, a mood borne out loneliness that might find a place in the civilized world after we return.

Heini Aho, a Finnish artist, attaches her video camera to a tripod on the white windswept plain of the Reinsdyrflya, a flat expanses surrounded by the distant white peaks beyond the Liefdefjord, or Fjord of Love. Then she poses in front of the camera and rapidly dresses and undresses herself with piles of hats, scarves, coats, gloves, and fleeces. When she’s down to a black turtleneck and balaclava she looks like some kind of arctic ninja performing some strange ritual that is not explained.

Finnish artist Heini Aho.

On the islands flat snow-covered plain are old glass bottles with clear liquid inside that hasn’t frozen. Vodka? Turpentine? We can’t smell it, we can hardly tell. There are spheres the size of soccer balls, made of plastic, metal, buoys for fishing nets. “Once I picked up one of those,” says our leader Jan, “and instead I found it was a human skull.” If you die up here no one will come to take your body out.

October 14th, sailing toward Magdalena Fjord, 79.6°N, 11°E

The bell rings on deck, that means there’s something to see. “Ayeaah,” says the captain, usually a man of few words, “seven polar bears eating an old whale carcass. I have only seen something like this a few times in all my journeys in the North.”

Every artist rushes to our cabins, grabs our latest-model cameras, and runs up on deck. The bears don’t seem interested in us, that slimy whale backbone looks so delicious. We can smell it easily a few hundred yards away, it’s probably been there for months. “Ooohhh…” someone says, “it looks like something out of a Matthew Barney film.”

Polar bear through camera lens and binoculars.

We watch the bears eating and playing for hours. It’s impossible to pull our eyes away. The raw reality of nature holds us transfixed. A couple of us remember Werner Herzog’s line in Grizzly Man, where the great director announces, coldly, “People think nature is beautiful, but I do not agree. To me it is nothing but a realm of cruelty, survival, and the relentless search for food.” With his beautiful documentaries Herzog shows that notion is just a pose, for he loves nature and has truly succeeded in revealing it in art, cutting far beyond the clichés and the preset stories of the wild we are all so used to.

Polar bears eating whale carcass.

Sure, I could tell you them all: the sea was rough, the cameras and computers were pitching to the floor. Wine glasses were breaking, milk spilled onto the floor. Waves from the sea sprayed us head to toe in the tiny zodiac as we made rough we landings on shore. The light is indescribable, the snowy peaks stretched into the distance forever. The immense loneliness zeros straight in on the sublime, where the land is great because we are so small.

I tell you those things and all of them are true. But we are artists, not tourists, so it should not be enough to be impressed by walruses and polar bears. But we all love the polar bears! Their bloody faces smile as they chew on rancid whale meat. You don’t become an artist by denying any tourist instincts. We all want to see and love the world. Just as artists in the Age of Exploration were the only ones to offer up images grand and graphic enough to show people back home what the far reaches of the globe can offer, today we must cut through a world saturated with images and stories to see if there can still be a fresh way of expressing one’s experiences on the journey, careening through the sea and back and forth from the frozen, empty land.

Oct. 18th, Ny Ålesund, Arctic Science Village

In Ny Ålesund, a former mining village that is now an international center for climate research, most of the two hundred researchers and technicians have left for the season. But at the Alfred Wegener Polar Institute, a German engineer still remains, for a whole year in this inaccessible outpost, to repeat the same experiments every day. In one he releases a large white weather balloon, each day at 1pm, which rises and drifts into the stratosphere before exploding when it gets too high, but not before transmitting essential data from its disposable radio which will never be found. Then at night he shoots a high energy laser beam straight up into the clouds, of such power that even a tiny fraction of its bright beam is diffused back through the cloud cover and can be registered by the naked eye. The beam bounces through the building inside a complex and irregular rectilinear box, down to the floor off a large telescope mirror, then straight up through a hole in the roof. The green ray heading skyward looks like it is strong enough to reach the moon.

Ny Ålesund, a former mining village, now an international center for climate research.

The German engineer speaks extremely precisely. He will not answer any questions around which he has even the slightest doubt. “Why do the stars here in the North flicker with such visible multiple spectra of color?” I ask, “shimmering from red then to green and to blue.”
“I know of what you speak,” he nods. “But I do not know enough astronomy to say anything more.”

“And what,” I point, “is that big wooden contrabass case doing next to the laser mirror, the beaten-up box that says ‘Berliner Philharmonische Orchester’ on it?”

“Oh,” he smiles. “Usually there is a instrument in there, but not right now. It is not mine.”

Oct. 19th, Barentsburg

If you think it is strange there is a Russian town on Spitsbergen, remember that this land is not exactly part of Norway. It really is a kind of no-man’s territory, not subject to any taxation, where historically a man could arrive from anywhere and stake a claim. The American Longyear founded Longyearbyen, the Russians had Pyramiden, now abandoned, and Barentsburg, still going strong. Long before climate change grabbed our attention the Arctic had tremendous strategic importance, and the Germans bombed all of it in World War II. They even had one far and remote weather station that was the final place the Nazis surrendered in September 1945.

Whereas Ny Ålesund is a curious modern science town of satellite dishes, nationalistic research buildings from nations as diverse as China, India, Germany and France, Barentsburg looks like a little slice of Siberia. You walk up to the city up hundreds of carefully constructed wooden steps, to emerge on a plateau with crumbling concrete buildings, most built in the sixties through eighties but generally looking much older. The faded grandeur of the Soviet time is out in full force, monuments everywhere you look. To the glory of the coal miner! To the arctic socialist explorer hand in hand with a polar bear! A concrete apartment building with a giant brick design of a Russian country maid.

Strangely, there are murals throughout the town (of perhaps 600 Russians, with room for about a thousand more) of green and leafy summer scenes, images of a landscape so far removed from where we now stand that it is hard to understand why anyone would want to paint them here. Is this some kind of wry Arctic joke? Or are these billboards advertising the land all the residents will sometime soon go home to?

Barentsburg, a Russian town in Norway.

The bartender at the one foreigners’ hotel smiles when I ask her, “how long have you been here?”
“My term is two years. The pay is good. But then I am getting out.”

In the middle of the night after hours of vodka in the bright fluorescent bar we are laughing in the dark, running down those perilous wood steps at top speed, slipping on rail tracks in the tunnels that lead from the mine. Around a corner we spy three coal-faced miners, returning from work. All of a sudden life here seems no longer a party, but risky, dirty work. We all go silent for a moment. But soon we start laughing again and run back to our boat.

Bar in Barentsburg.

Oct. 17th, Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden

In 1910 Ernest Mansfield was convinced that this was going to be the site of the greatest marble quarry in the world, so he set up the Northern Exploration Company to cut all the stone out. He named the spot New London. Some of his machines remain right on the rails, having never even been used. The whole project fell apart, there was nothing worth taking.

The more we experience this distance the place, the less it seems it’s a wilderness. Spitsbergen is the warmest place in the Arctic, because it’s the end of the gulf stream, so much of the sea surrounding remains ice-free most of the year. Already by 1700 the Dutch had killed all the whales here, and after that came trappers, hunters, miners, still trying to extract something useful out of the landscape. What might remain most useful today is strategy—a few years ago a cable was laid all the way from Norway under the sea, bringing fast communication to the outside world. There are now hundreds of scientists stationed up here keeping track of what will happen to a warming world.

Blomstrand halvøya, Krossfjorden

The mining sputters on, the locals still hang onto it with pride. Greenpeace was up here just before we arrived demanding that the coal mines shut down. Of course they are wasteful, hopeless, destined to fail like the quarry at Blomstrand. Coal mining has no place in the Arctic, no place anywhere. If we work hard enough we’ll soon find better sources of energy: from the sun, the wind, the waves.

Is that a workable dream? Spitsbergen is full of the graves of dreams that failed. The beauty of the place is a success, it cannot be tamed. Or is that only because we cannot see deep into history?

Oct. 20th

On shore beneath a glacier the wind whips up around us, the most furious storm on the trip. It is snow, it is rain, something in between that cuts the skin. The artists are making their final gestures in the field. Heini Aho is trying to build a final fire sheltered beneath chunks of ice. Willy Somma is running all around, jumping onto icebergs, photographing herself in flight. Some of us are huddled in a snow cave, one of us, Amy Wiita, is actually swimming, in a dry suit. The wind whips up, snow is all over our faces, and we can’t believe that soon we will be going home and this whole confined world, this small group tossed together in the swaying seas to observe, to wonder, to create, will all be disbanded, and we will have to figure out how to hold onto this journey back in our usual lives of warmth and of light.

Ice fire.

Artists.

Ship and snow.

David Rothenberg.

David Rothenberg is the author of Thousand Mile Song and Why Birds Sing. He is now busy making music out of the sounds of crackling ice.

Some music made out of the sounds of the ship hitting ice (Ice Baby):

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By Simmons Buntin, September 29, 2009 5:26 am

By Jennifer McStotts

When the draft for Vietnam was in full swing, my father volunteered not because he believed in the war or lusted for battle, but because he couldn’t avoid the draft. He knew if he volunteered, he would get a better assignment, and if he survived, his life afterward would be more stable. A risky reason to enlist, but it is also common thinking among women who serve: the desire for training, for education, for opportunity and stability. Much like many women who serve today, his enlistment launched three decades of silence in his family. The first time I remember him mentioning Vietnam was in my late teens. We were in twining lines waiting for flu shots, staying together until we were divided, men to the left, women to the right. He stood just off my shoulder, and as we neared the split, he asked, “Are you squeamish about needles?”

I chuckled. “No, are you?”

To my surprise he gave the smallest shudder and said, as our lines split apart, “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person, but for some reason needles still give me the creeps.”

He didn’t speak of his service even as I considered joining myself, except to say that a commission was better than enlistment and that serving as a woman was not easy. Choosing to remain a civilian isn’t something I regret; in fact, it is a luxury for which I am thankful, but it was pressing on my mind as I sat down, Saturday evening in Tucson, Ariz., for the performance of Coming in Hot.

The stageplay is an adaptation of selections from the Kore Press anthology, Powder: Writing by Women in the Military, from Vietnam to Iraq, which collects the work of nineteen women who served in the U.S. military in a variety of roles. Lisa Bowden and Shannon Cain, the co-editors, admit that they “went into the project with the idea that this work would contribute to the chorus of opposition to the war in Iraq . . . We saw immediately the necessity of setting aside any bias and agenda.” It was, nonetheless, this agenda, bias, and perspective that made me wonder if the adapted work would be solely anti-war, primarily a piece of activism, especially given that the work was produced by Kore Press and directed by Bowden.

What the audience witnessed was a well-balanced collection of monologues composed into a one-woman show featuring Jeanmarie Simpson (original score by accompanist Vicki Brown on strings and pedals, with recorded voice talents of Donald Paul Stockton and Kaylene Torregrossa). Before I go any further, I would like to applaud Simpson. While her performance wasn’t flawless, she was also presented with a nearly impossible task in portraying 14 distinct characters in 80 minutes, without costume change; she did so successfully — laudably — using her voice, her mannerisms, and her versatility as an actress, but at times the variety of accents necessary to distinguish so many women became less convincing.

It is troubling that the adaption and direction called for Simpson to do so in the first place. The message or point of the play could have been narrowed, refined, or, in the alternative, the number of monologues could have been reduced (19 contributions became 14 characters, and an even greater number of segments given the recurring appearance of Charlotte Brock’s character in Mortuary Affairs). Characters could have been conflated without much loss of narrative effect and without forcing Simpson to stretch to distinguish them; as one audience member said immediately after the performance, “There were too many stories. It was too much, and it didn’t say enough.”

That said, despite missed light cues, despite a few stuttered lines and awkward moments involving her blocking, Simpson brought life to characters within the simplicity of an otherwise stark production. The set consisted only of one chair and one table — more of an operating table, clinical and spare — which was primarily used for the Mortuary Affairs scenes in which Brock’s character stood over it as if looking down on a body. The lighting consisted of only a few overhead fixtures at various angles with the exception of one water effect and one flashlight held by a crew member. What felt strange, to me, was the balance the director struck between the one-woman show format — meant to emphasize character and message — and the use of recorded voice segments to supplement Simpson’s work. In addition, it was confusing that at first the recorded voices were only used for the male voice of a boot camp instructor, then a female voice for the character Simpson was portraying silently on stage, and finally that same female voice switched to a male role. While I don’t agree with one audience member’s assessment that it would have been better to focus on a very small number of stories — four being the number she mentioned — it did feel inconsistent to rely on the one-actor model while supplementing and distracting from her performance in a variety of ways.

The original score by Vicki Brown was a perfect accompaniment to the monologues. Brown used the same themes and structure each time Simpson returned to the recurring character of Charlotte Brock in the mortuary. At other times, her music set the heartbeat of the scene, calling its pace; at every moment, she took the pain and the challenge of Brock’s writing (and Simpson’s portrayal) to a higher level.

These recurring scenes pulled me in the most and made me think — again, as I often have before — of my father’s offhand comment. “I’ve put parts into body bags that you couldn’t even tell were once a person.” Brock says something very similar about “the contents of the bags” that Mortuary Affairs handled, especially in one harrowing scene in which the deceased is little more than “a head, a hand, and an arm.”

What Simpson, Bowden, and Cain attempted to do in the adaptation and performance was no easy task — to tell these stories and to grant these women their individual voices when their silence has been so pervasive. What perhaps made the sections by Brock so powerful was that she, too, was trying to give someone a voice, both herself in the world in which she found herself surrounded, but also the dead who lay upon that table.

About the Blogger

Jennifer McStotts is the daughter, niece, and ex-wife of United States Marines, as well as a second-year MFA student in creative nonfiction. Her work has been published in Future Anterior, in International Journal of Heritage Studies, and by Preservation Books.

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By Simmons Buntin, July 27, 2009 5:28 am

By Joshua David Bellin

From June 22 to July 17, I was one of 25 college and university faculty to participate in the National Endowment for the Humanities summer institute on Aldo Leopold. Titled “‘A Fierce Green Fire at 100’: Aldo Leopold and the Roots of Environmental Ethics,” the institute commemorated the 100-year anniversary of Leopold’s arrival in Arizona to take up his first position with the United States Forest Service. During the course of the four weeks, we heard from experts in the field; traveled to locations Leopold visited during his time in the Southwest; discussed and debated Leopold’s legacy in the disciplines of environmental ethics, wildlife ecology, conservation biology, and environmental literature; and (occasionally) unwound over a few beers. It was an exhausting, invigorating, exhilarating experience, one that taught me loads about Leopold and, more importantly, about the distance we have yet to travel to approach the ideal he voiced sixty years ago in “The Land Ethic,” his signature essay from A Sand County Almanac (1949): “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

The institute took place in Prescott, Arizona (pronounced like British “waistcoat”), a small town that, at an elevation of 5,300 feet, provides a summertime refuge from the brutal heat of Phoenix. “Everybody’s Hometown,” banners on lampposts announce; the ubiquitous ravens who cackle imperiously from atop these perches seem to agree. The former state capitol of Arizona, Prescott now offers mostly tourist attractions, including remnants of a once-famous Whiskey Row, plenty of restaurants and antique shops, and (so they say) the world’s oldest rodeo. July is monsoon season, when moisture from the Sea of Cortez gets sucked up into the sky and dumped on the land in storms of amazing suddenness and ferocity. West of town Thumb Butte, haven for nesting peregrines, floats in the blue distance. Our accommodations were provided by Prescott College, an experimental school founded in the 1960s that offers a robust environmental curriculum, recycled granite in the bathrooms, herds of wild javelinas wandering the alleyways between dorms, and neither grades nor credits. Our main classroom, in the Sharlot Hall regional history museum, was an unfinished cement studio space with a horrendous echo and squealing chairs; considering that the museum now faces the loss of all state funding due to Arizona’s budget crisis, though, the director and staff were incredibly generous in permitting us to take over their grounds for a month.

The institute’s participants were a diverse group, both regionally and by discipline. Philosophers were particularly well represented (all of them, unlike me, sporting enviable heads of hair; maybe philosophical reflection encourages follicle retention). But there were also faculty from my own disciplines of Literature and American Studies, as well as from Biology, Religious Studies, Political Science, Women’s Studies, and even, in the case of a woman who teaches in Hawaii, Dance. The disciplinary diversity, unfortunately, wasn’t matched by much visible ethnic diversity, though one woman did tell me she’s part-Cherokee. Inevitably, our discussions turned to issues of environmental justice, something Leopold, surrounded though he was by Native and Hispanic populations, barely touched on, and something our own ethnic makeup suggested still needs to be vigorously addressed. We also talked about hunting — another Leopold passion that the vegetarians in the group, myself included, wrestled mightily to understand as a form of love for the wild — as well as about the question of Leopold’s radicalism (or lack thereof), the applicability of his land ethic to the global-scale environmental crises we now face, the proliferation of land ethics in such contemporary settings as urban gardens and the slow foods movement, and much more. The faculty who steered us through these subjects represented the cream of the Leopold crop: biographer Curt Meine, a cheerful and energetic soul who offered me an impromptu lesson in reading land health during an interminable bus ride to Leopold’s rookie post of Springerville, Arizona; Julianne Newton, whose own biography of Leopold emphasizes the development of his ecological thinking; J. Baird Callicott, the dean of environmental ethics, who almost single-handedly put Leopold on the map for philosophers initially inclined to dismiss him as a mere government functionary unworthy of joining their arcane brotherhood; and in the final week, author Scott Russell Sanders, whose writings, including his recent, marvelous A Conservationist Manifesto (reviewed in the forthcoming issue of Terrain.org), have earned him a spot in the Leopold tradition of environmentalist philosophy and prophecy. By month’s end, all of us had designed or retooled syllabi that we’ll be taking home to our own campuses, as well as making publicly available on the website of the Institute for Humanities Research at Arizona State University. If in so doing we can spread the gospel of Leopold to as wide and diverse an audience as possible, the institute will have served its purpose.

I’ve always respected Leopold as both a thinker and writer, but the institute gave me a greater appreciation both for the quality of his ideas and for the lengthy process by which he achieved their full flowering. When he first arrived in the Southwest, Leopold was a faithful disciple of the Progressive-era utilitarianism preached by the head of the Forest Service, Gifford Pinchot, who saw timber as a “crop” to be managed solely for commercial purposes. Only gradually, over decades of observation, reflection, communication with leaders in the emerging field of ecology, object lessons in the United States and abroad, and more than his fair share of mistakes and missteps, did Leopold emerge as the revolutionary thinker who emphasized the need for humans to live harmoniously with the natural world, to reject economic profit as the sole measure of the land’s value, to view the biota as a unified whole with which humans should tamper only reluctantly, and to understand ourselves as a part of that unity, linked to the land in material, historical, ethical, and spiritual ways. The Southwest proved a fertile starting-point for Leopold’s development, his tutorship in the region’s fragile ecosystems making him particularly alert to the human impact on the land. It was also in the Southwest that the seeds were sown for his most dramatic about-face: his revolution from advocate of predator eradication to defender of wolves and grizzlies as essential members of the land community. In a stunning confessional from his most famous short essay, “Thinking Like a Mountain,” Leopold recounts the epiphany he experienced upon the downing of a mother wolf:

We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes — something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Leopold exaggerates and compresses his revelation here; though a letter has recently surfaced proving that he did indeed shoot two timber wolves during his first year in Arizona, it would be decades before he seriously reconsidered the wisdom of predator-eradication programs. (Indeed, in the letter itself, he laments not the death of the wolves but the loss of his pipe.) But as Scott Sanders pointed out, the fact that Leopold retells this incident in a way that isn’t literally true enables him to evoke its deeper truth: the need for each of us to see the land as a living whole, worthy of our love and respect. In this sense, Leopold provides a powerful example for students and for all of us who struggle to meet the environmental challenges of our time: rather than assuming that he knew what was best for the earth, he allowed that far older and wiser teacher to instruct him in its ways.

In Leopold’s essay “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” written in 1923 but unpublished until 1979, some 30 years after his death, he places the American experiment in its historical context and finds occasion for judgment and regret: “Five races — five cultures — have flourished here. We may truthfully say of our four predecessors that they left the earth alive, undamaged. Is it possibly a proper question for us to consider what the sixth shall say about us?” I hold this question in my mind as I return to my home to teach, to raise my children, and to work for the restoration and revitalization of the land.

Joshua David Bellin with his children at the Grand Canyon, a not-too-far drive from Prescott, Arizona.

About the Blogger

Joshua David Bellin teaches American, Native American, and Environmental Literature at La Roche College in Pittsburgh. Having published three scholarly books and numerous articles in these fields, he has recently taken a break from academic writing to focus on fiction and creative nonfiction. Under the pen name of J. David Bell, he has published in such periodicals as Word Catalyst, SNReview, Gander Press Review, Queen City Review, and the upcoming issue of Terrain.org.