Toward a New Resilience: Building Whole Communities
For the Southern Maine Conservation Collaborative
October, 2013
What an honor to be here: a place of such great beauty. Beauty shows itself in lots of ways,
right? A vista can be beautiful; a healthy estuary can be beautiful. The sight of a fishing boat on
an ebbing tide can be beautiful.
A community, itself, can also be beautiful. There’s a sum of relationships, hard to describe or
measure that a healthy community nurtures and protects that is truly beautiful. I think this sum
of relationships is a community’s true wealth.
So, I want to talk with you this evening about true wealth; not the wealth in a bank account, but
the wealth that’s relationships between people, and between people and this place. Winston
Churchill had a famous line about wealth that I rather like. He said: “You earn a living by what
you make, but you make a life by what you share.”
True wealth is the number of people you can call when something goes wrong. True wealth is the
quality of promises we make to one another, and keep, that we’re gonna help each other in a
flood or a snow storm.
True wealth is the unspoken commitment that I cannot really succeed in my life if you fail in
yours. True wealth is the promises we make to each other about how we’re going to live together
on this patch of earth, what we will and won’t do to the land, or to each other. A conservation
easement, for example, is a promise a landowner makes to the community. Put a bunch of those
promises together and you have true wealth.
Put aside every nice thing Jess said and consider instead my true wealth.
This is also who I am: Bull Run Farm, Sages Ravine, Spruce Knob, Dickinson’s Reach,
Heron’s Rip, Moosilauke, Arun River Valley, Central Harlem, Cedar Mesa, Chama River, Arch
Rock, Drake’s Beach, Lake Atitlan, Knoll Farm.
That’s me. These words, these places, tell my story. These places are the waters, the food, the
wood, the dreams, and the memories that literally make up this body. These places define me.
I’m that alchemy of land, people and story.
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And this is also my story: I’m youngest son of a Jewish immigrant who came here from poverty
and a city in the Ukraine. He arrived with a different name and a different language. This was
his first experience of America … but he instilled in me a love of land and wilderness. His
“sense of place” is different from my own: he had Brooklyn’s gritty and polluted East River and
he gave me a love of the wild. I am forever privileged by all that he had to do for himself and for
me to make a home in America.
His legacy makes it impossible for me to think about place without also thinking about “Place for
whom?”
And I can’t think about true wealth without also thinking about this word: Querencia. Show of
hands, how many of you have heard of this word?
It’s a mestizo word, defined for me by Estavan Arrellano:
The place where the animal lives
The tendency of humans to return to where they were born
Affection, Responsibility
The space where one feels secure
The place of one’s memories
The tendency to love and be loved
This word, and many others like it in other languages, suggests that our affection and
responsibility to one another, to community, has always been intimately connected to our
relationship to place.
And Querencia doesn’t just exist for some people, it exists for all people.
The land is there waiting for all of us. There’s no special membership to join, and no required
education before you shake hands. The land welcomes bankers and farmers, people in business
suits and people in torn Carhardts. The land doesn’t care if you’re young or old, brown or white.
Our biology is hard-wired to it. We are always seeking its rhythms. The sounds of its heart beat
calls to us every moment of every day.
We answer this call when we stand in front of ocean and feel the power and grace. Some can feel
it in stones polished by the sea. That intimate experience of wind, water and sky creates caring.
And to care is not Republican or Democrat, conservative or radical. To care is not reserved for
environmentalists. To care is simply human.
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Querencia is big part of how and why people care. And Querencia is closely related to True
Wealth, right? These two ideas explain how and why people greet one another in town, the
neighborliness in a winter storm, our ability to disagree vehemently on a town issue and then
come together for a potluck.
The interconnectedness between love of land and love of each other is the most important and
least understood story of our culture and of our conservation movement.
The guy with the notebook is Aldo Leopoeld, the author of Sand County Almanac, one of the
fathers of our modern conservation movement and the guy who really understood love of land
and love of each other. But he died much too early to help the rest of us understand it.
I have wrestled for years with this short statement of his:
“There are two things that interest me; the relationship of people to each other, and
the relationship of people to land.”
Part is easy to understand: people need healthy land, healthy forests, and healthy oceans to be
healthy themselves. Richard Louv got us to consider how much children need nature to grow up
into healthy adults.
But the other part of what he’s saying asks is difficult and provocative; how I treat you and how
you might treat someone else affects nature?
How do bad relations between people affect the health of the land? Prove it!
When we are greedy, trying to best each other, when we are at odds, when we fear each other,
when we are under the influence of spells, lies and myths, we always hurt the land as much as we
hurt ourselves.
Every time.
When we are fearful of each other and put up walls between neighborhoods or walls between
nations, the land suffers.
When we oppress each other, we feel more licenses to oppress the land.
When we are at war, the land dies too.
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In a much less dramatic and more everyday sense sense, whenever we put the drive for more
money ahead of our yearning for better relationships, we hurt the land. We use it, tear it up, we
put chemicals into it, and then we lie to ourselves and say it doesn’t matter. The failings of our
culture always become visible on the land. People and nature share the same destiny.
And there’s no sign or law big enough or strong enough that’s going to stop the suffering of
humanity from hurting the land.
And when we feel secure with eachother, when we are less fearful, when we feel at peace with
the world around us, when we believe we have enough: then the land breathes and heals.
Every place on earth bears the fruits and the scars of that relationship between people.
So, if this is true, then one of the most durable ways to help the health of the land, to be a good
conservationist, is to focus also on healing relationships between people.
Your eyes are rolling. I have a 15 year old and I can recognize it.
So, I have an even more difficult thing to say: one of the most important ways to heal
relationships between people is to reconnect them to the land.
That’s a big challenge for some conservationists to take in: we may not be able to protect land
from people; we may only be able to protect land with people. Here’s the rub: as a conservation
movement, we’ve spent a lot of time “protecting” land from people and precious little time being
in dialogue about what’s a healthy relationship with it.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m no simpleton advocating “thou shalt not post your land or love thy
neighbor.” You can’t always love your neighbor, and sometimes land ought to be posted no
trespassing. What I’m trying to say is that our relationship to this place ought to be like a
marriage.
My marriage has long moments of love and it has long moments of misunderstanding and hurt,
but I’m committed to it for the long haul. I want us to be committed to the relationship between
people and place for the long haul.
Let me tell you a story. Remember Michael Pollan, the food writer?
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Leading up to the millennium in 2000, the New York Times spent several years creating a 1,000
year time capsule to be opened in the year 3,000. They spent years deciding what should go into
this time capsule, but their toughest decision was where to place the time capsule. What would
really protect it best over a thousand years?
Do they bury it in the ground like a dog bone? Do they create a law from Congress that legislates
future generations to protect it? Do they raise a ton of money to endow 20 generations of
stewards to stand guard beside it and to check on it every few years or so? Each one of these
plausible solutions was examined thoroughly and tossed out for being insufficient to actually
protect this time capsule over 1,000 years.
Then the New York Times asked themselves a very helpful question, what’s still here today that
was here in 1,000 AD? They could come up with only two answers: the Catholic Church and
several examples of beautiful art. So, they decided that they very, very best way to truly protect
this time capsule for 1,000 years was to make it as beautiful as possible and to place it in an
obvious and very visible public place so that people would love it, cherish it, and call it their
own.
The best way to protect something for 1,000 years is to help people to be in relationship with it.
The land trusts here have done beautiful, important work for well over 30 years, how will you
make it last 1,000 years? What are the relationships that will be necessary?
And as you seek out new relationships, as I know you’re doing now, how will you start those?
Will you expect people to see conservation differently and walk closer toward you, or will you
see yourselves differently and walk closer to the people?
There have been many who have helped me to understand this fundamental relationship between
healthy land and healthy people.
Early in my career, I worked as a freelance photographer in Southeast Asia where I spent two
years in Nepal, a place where time was counted in the cycles of the moon and in the passing of
seasons of rain and snow. They gave this young American a completely new definition of true
wealth. Their currency was rice and one’s labor, their jobs were to feed one another and to stay
in relationship with their land and their gods, and their wealth was all the neighbors who would
come when something went wrong.
Or my friendship with the Maine homesteader and social critic, Bill Coperthwaite. Bill’s
inspiration for his innovative architecture and principles of democracy-in-living come from his
love of the land that has sustained his bold experiment in living. There are four miles of
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Downeast coastline and tidal estuary that Bill calls home and this land and he have gently shaped
one another in a relationship that’s lasted fifty years. I’ve learned from Bill how land is not
whole without people, and that people are not whole without the skill and craft of living well in
place.
Or my alliance with Classie Parker, a third generation resident of 121 rst street in Central Harlem
who has turned vacant lots into community gardens. It was Classsie who said to me on the first
occasion that I met her, “If you have come here to help me you are wasting your time, but if you
have come here because your liberation is bound up in my liberation then let’s work together.”
Classie, perhaps more than any other teacher, helped me to understand that my work in
conservation was fundamentally about healing relationships and helping to make whole people.
This is what I’ve learned from all those experiences: creating healthy, whole communities is the
process of sustaining and repairing relationships between people and between people and place.
Imagine these possibilities:
Imagine a 9 year old girl in elementary school who walks up to the milk dispenser in the
cafeteria and pours into her glass milk that her own family produced.
Imagine if all the public schools here were all serving locally grown food and heated by local
wood, that you had mapped your forests to know how you could heat half of all the homes
forever. Better than that, imagine you’d figured out how to use your sun, wind and water to
become a net producer of energy. That you developed your own energy bank that loaned
residents funds to stay warm but also become more efficient and renewable.
Imagine that there are 50 small-scale farms producing one-third of all the food you eat here.
Imagine every kid growing up in this region went to a great public school that got them outside,
gave them space to build forts, and made it common knowledge what the tides were doing, when
the Alewife were due back, and what phase of the moon we were in.
Imagine you once again had a maker culture here, where most everyone’s furniture was locally
made, where you had the skills to build homes that would last two hundred years, that “made by
hand” didn’t mean quaint and expensive, but useful and common`.
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Imagine the land trust really understands their own privilege and in response sells portions of
their conserved lands to cooperatives of lower-income residents who need the firewood, or the
access to a working waterfront, or just the benefits of land ownership.
Imagine that every lobsterman, fisherman, carpenter and lawyer knew their kid had the option of
doing the same work if they wanted to because the fishery was healthy, the community was
healthy, and the work was respected.
Imagine you were confident that your children and grandchildren could afford to live here.
Imagine you didn’t need house keys because the door is never locked, that you didn’t need car
keys because cars were never locked.
Imagine you lived in community that really knew what it wanted to become, that understood the
consequences of change, that was perfectly willing to grow in human population as long as it
also grew in bear and bobcat population, a community that is known for its strong relationships,
among its people who are connected to the ocean, the estuaries, the woods, and each other.
You don’t have to imagine any of these; they’re real. They’re happening in different
communities, intentional actions taken by land conservation groups who want to help rebuild and
repair their community. They don’t think these changes are nostalgic or quant or “back to the
land: these are real efforts to go forward to something more meaningful than what they have
today.
What makes these changes possible?
In every case, 3 things made these changes possible:
1. They decided what they wanted to be as a community. The most fundamental and
difficult question around this is: do you want to be organized for consumption or do you
want to be organized for production.
2) They had a land trust partner who was able to express the importance of the land to a
great diversity of the community, and then help the community to do something about
that.
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3) They had citizen leaders who became fully mobilized around one or more of the
transformative issues of this time: food, energy, childhood education, and peoples’ health
and wellbeing.
Let me try to take each of these in turn.
What are you for? Who does this community aspire to be?
You already have been many things: A bedroom community to Portland, a summer community
for painters,
This landscape has already served many needs. And it could be many different things in the
future.
I’d wager that every community in Maine faces a choice right now of whether or not it wants to
be organized for production or organized for consumption. Careful now, I’m talking about
something much more important and subtle than the simple choice between industrial forestry
and tourism.
I’m talking about the difference between being a maker culture or a consumer culture. In a
maker culture, a community has the skills to turn its own wood into lumber, its own sheep into
sweaters and meat, its own soil into food, its own scenery into art. In a maker culture, difference
is honored because it adds to the total knowledge and skill of the community, which is its
greatest wealth. In a maker culture, the community develops in decidedly different and unique
directions, but they make their cultures on their own stitch by stitch.
In a consumer culture, the individual derives their sense of identity and purpose by what they
buy and consume from others. They are not tied to a particular place, but instead to a global
economy. People within consumer cultures have lifestyles more than livelihoods. Consumer
cultures tend to look very much the same no matter where they are, their familiar patterns
dictated by distant corporations and webs of commerce and debt.
I see rural communities everywhere becoming consumer cultures as they lose their relationship
to the land and to one another.
Land Trusts, obviously, can play an enormously important role in a perpetuating a community’s
relationships to one another and the land. But it depends on the land trusts ability to connect
with and represent the whole community, and to work on projects which serve more and more of
the community.
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25 and 30 years ago, most innovative land trusts were working on protecting iconic scenery and
biodiversity, and now the most innovative land trusts are focusing their conservation on
sustaining livelihoods, on increasing public health, on strengthening food systems, and on how
we educate our children.
The outcomes of this work are more resilient, healthier communities more closely connected to
the land, and a land trust that transcends its privileged roots to be in service to more Mainers.
This is something new called community conservation, which is the natural progression of a
successful movement that has come to understand how its shares a destiny with the community
in which it works. Both land conservation and community can be strengthened when they are
brought together.
So, as you are listening, you are hearing that community conservation is about becoming
something different.
You folks are great achievers, and everyone honors that. You set big goals and you accomplish
them. Community conservation is definitely about doing big things, but it’s also about allowing
you to become something new. Here are the elements of that:
It’s about matching transactional strength with relational strength
It’s about communicating why you do conservation not just how you do conservation.
It’s about listening first to hear what people need, and then finding the sweet spot where
their need and your goals overlap.
This work of connecting land and community asks us to grow our capacity to understand and
work with difference.
No matter who you are: a have or a have-less, well-educated or less-educated, white collar or
blue-collar, conservative or liberal, white or a person of color, a fact of contemporary American
life is that you will likely live mostly among people similar to yourself. Even as we are growing
more diverse (USA will be dominate nonwhite by 2042), we are growing more balkanized, more
separate from one another. The result is, and always has been, fear and lack of understanding of
the other. Fear and lack of understanding is really bad for relationships. And they are also really
bad for the land.
Fear is what keeps us from talking to one another. Fear erodes our democracies because it
polarizes us against one another. Fear keeps us from innovating because it limits us to our own
ideas and knowledge.
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Innovative land trusts are using their position and the land itself
to create the ways for difference in a community to come together, to recreate and work together,
to share story, to fear each other less.
Maybe the most important thing anyone can do is to regularly sit down with someone you don’t
know and have a cup of coffee.
Our healthy relationship to land is the means by which we all generate, re-create, and renew
transcendent values such as beauty, responsibility, love and the sacred, on which both ethics and
morality depend.
As you consider it, let’s look up for a moment and consider the larger world around us.
Imagine for a moment a small village here in Maine. Imagine if that small village of 100 people
were representative of the world’s population.
50 would be female
50 would be male
20 would be children
80 would be adults (14 of whom would be older than 65)
There would be 61 Asians in this village, 12 Europeans, 13 Africans, 14 people from the western
hemisphere.
In this village, there would be 21 Christians
21 Muslims
14 Hindus
6 Buddhists
12 people who believe in other religions
16 people not aligned with a religion
17 would speak Chinese
8 would speak Hindustani
8 would speak English
7 would speak Spanish
4 would speak Arabic
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4 would speak Russian
52 would speak other languages
82 would be able to read and write, 18 would not
1 would have a college education
1 would own a computer
75 people would have some supply of food and a place to shelter them from the wind and rain
but 25 would not
1 would be dying of starvation
17 would be malnourished
15 would be overweight
83 would have access to clean drinking water and 17 would not.
We are privileged beyond words to live the way we do, and the hope of future abundance
depends upon of awareness and response toward this difference, not out of charity but out of
deep awareness that my children will live in a diminished world if anyone else’s children, that I
cannot see, live in a diminished life today.
Trying to cross these differences is the act of truly seeing one other and responding with all the
courage we have.
This work of building resilient community can leave no one out.
Not the folks at Bingo night, or at the Golf Club.
There’s a word for this: Ubuntu
You may have heard Archbishop Desmond Tutu use it. It is a Nigerian word that means the
primacy of relationship and mutuality, that we are all connected, that we all share the same fate.
At the core of what I’m talking about is simple effort of helping very different people to take
their best step toward one another. Conservation has a big role to play in this. I imagine
everyone listening to me understands from their own life experience how fragmentation and
isolation is institutionalized in our country right now. We are pitted against each other, divided
by class by politics, by privilege, by race; and in our heart hearts, most of us also recognize that
this separation is the opposite of wholeness.
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Everyone who has chosen to live here desires their own personal relationship to this landscape.
And knowing this place well, transforming that relationships from a date to a marriage is a
powerful act of community-building. It can bring people together and repair.
This is how one places seeds into ashes and grows beautiful things.
You’re most important work over the next ten years is to define in words and deeds what your
vision is for this part of Maine, and to put that vision forward in a way that all your neighbors
can see themselves in.
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