Mountaintop Mining Activist Judy Bonds Dies of Cancer at 58

“We can complain all we want, but those complaints are just swept aside in the name of progress and jobs. It’s like we’re selling our children’s feet to buy shoes.” –Activist Judy Bonds
Judy Bonds.jpg
Before we read Ann Pancake’s novel Strange as this Weather Has Been this spring, we watched the 2009 documentary on mountaintop mining entitled Coal Country.

One of the most compelling and impassioned voices in the film was Judy Bonds, an activist leading the charge against “mountaintop removal.” It was poignant watching her rail against the practice that adversely affects human health and the environment, knowing that Judy had died of cancer in January 2011, only a few years after playing a central role in the movement and the film.

Several obituaries and tribute articles give helpful and interesting background on Judy and the movement she spearheaded:

(photo of Judy Bonds originally published
by The Washington Post, 1/4/11)

The Southwest in Images & Text

glen canyon dam lake.jpg

Last March (2010), I traveled through the Southwest with my family for Spring Break–from Albuquerque, NM, we drove through Gallup, NM, on our way up to Canyon de Chelly near Chinle, AZ. Next stop was Glen Canyon, near Page, AZ, and then on to the Grand Canyon.

While I had read Encounters with the Archdruid (McPhee) and Ceremony (Silko) before, reading them again this spring with the images fresh in my mind allowed me to enter the texts more fully. I had stayed in Gallup, talked to a Navajo couple who were walking in Canyon de Chelly alongside us, stood atop the Glen Canyon Dam, drank in the colors, the weather, the ever-shifting sky.

So I thought I’d try to link up some of the language from our texts with the images I brought back with me.

———————-


From John McPhee’s Encounters with the Archdruid, Part 3, “A River”:


“David Brower believes that the dam in Glen Canyon represents the greatest failure of his life. He cannot think of it without melancholy, for he sincerely believes that its very existence is his fault. He feels that if he had been more aware, if he had more adequately prepared himself for his own kind of mission, the dam would not be there. Its gates closed in 1963, and it began backing up water a hundred and eighty-six miles into Utah. The reservoir is called
Lake Powell, and it covers country that Brower himself came to know too late. He made his only trips there–float trips on the river with his children–before the gates were closed but after the dam, which had been virtually unopposed, was under construction. Occasionally, in accompaniment to the talks he gives around the country, Brower shows an elegiac film about Glen Canyon “the place no one knew.” That was the trouble, he explains. No one knew what was there.” (163)

Thumbnail image for glen canyon dam.jpg“Dominy switched on a projector and screened the rough cut of a movie he had had prepared as an antidote to the Sierra Club’s filmed elegy to the inundated canyons under Lake Powell. Dominy’s film was called ‘Lake Powell, Jewel of the Colorado,’ and over an aerial shot of its blue fjords reaching into the red desert a narrator said, ‘Through rock and sand, canyon and cliff, through the towering formations of the sun-drenched desert, the waters of the Colorado River pause on their way to the sea.’  Water skiers cut wakes across the water.

‘Too many people think of environment simply as untrammelled nature,’ Dominy commented. ‘Preservation groups claim we destroyed this area because we made it accessible to man. Six hundred thousand people a year use that lake now.’

The film showed a Navajo on horseback in a blazing-red silk shirt.’Into his land came Lake Powell, which he has woven into his ancient ways,’ said the narrator.'” (171)

Horseshoe Curve (Colorado River) near Glen Canyon:
horseshoe curve.jpg
“The conservation movement is a mystical and religious force, and possibly the reaction to dams is so violent because rivers are the ultimate metaphor for existence, and dams destroy rivers…

A voice from the back of the room asks, ‘Why are you conservationists always against things?’…

Brower answers: ‘If you are against a dam, you are for a river.'” (159)

Antelope Canyon, a slot canyon near Glen Canyon:

slot canyon antelope canyon.jpg

near and above glen canyon.jpg
kids and sun.jpg


Sunrise!
We come at sunrise
to greet you.
We call you
at sunrise.
Father of the clouds
you are beautiful
at sunrise.
Sunrise!

(Ceremony, p. 182)

canyon de chelly from above.jpg

blue rock.jpg

plant and desert varnish.jpg

(My kids soaking up sunshine above  Horseshoe Curve, AZ)

white house cliff dwelling.jpg
grand canyon snow.jpg


Thumbnail image for grand canyon with colorado river below.jpg
Thumbnail image for Thumbnail image for grandcanyon with tree.jpg
Canyon de Chelly
near Chinle, AZ

Streaks of “Desert Varnish”
on the walls of Canyon de Chelly,
with White House cliff dwelling below.

This is the only hike non-Navajo are allowed to take into the canyon without a Navajo guide.

Grand Canyon, AZ

Fly Fishing @ Penn State and in Amer. Lit.

After wrapping up our discussion of A River Runs Through It and “Big Two-Hearted River” in class today, an article in today’s Daily Collegian caught my eye:

“Penn State’s heritage is deeply rooted in agriculture and the outdoors — and three kinesiology classes allow students to get in touch with that heritage by learning the sport of fly fishing.”

Read the full story here.

fly fishing.jpeg

Big Water
copyright
Bob White

O Pioneers: Whitman, Cather, and Levi’s

Have you seen the Levi’s ad that uses a Walt Whitman text to convince you to buy their jeans?

Willa Cather’s novels  My Antonia and O Pioneers! explore the challenges of pioneer life on the American prairie frontier in the 1880s. O Pioneers! was published in 1913, five years before My Antonia.  A C-Span discussion of Cather’s novel O Pioneers! notes that “The title is taken from Walt Whitman’s poem “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” which, like the novel, celebrates the frontier virtues of inner strength and spirit.” The poem intones: “Oh you youths, Western youths, so impatient, full of action, full of manly pride and friendship….fresh and strong the world we seize…”

And we see young people–the target audience of this advertising campaign–frolicking with each other and on their own out in the wild. Fire. Waterfalls. Fields of Yellow Flowers. They run through fields…dance bare-chested before bonfires …wrestle…make out (are those 2 boys kissing?). The language of the poem is urgent, repetitious, like a drumbeat. It instructs the “pioneers” to fight and seize the West. The ad ends with the written injunction “Go Forth.”

Does it make you want to buy Levi’s?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HG8tqEUTlvs

National Parks: Scripture of Nature

The segments of Ken Burns’ documentary The National Parks: America’s Best Idea that we watched in class last Tuesday were drawn from the first episode, entitled “The Scripture of Nature” (1851-1890). While I showed the segments that featured John Muir and his role as an early American environmentalist and promoter of the national parks idea, larger questions associated with the birth of our national parks infuse these segments:

muir and tr.jpg

  • Should the federal government have the right to take land and keep it from private use?
  • Why should national parks and preserves exist?
  • What should be allowed in their borders?
  • Who should control them?

Yosemite is the starting place for this story of America’s “scripture of nature.” After the California Gold Rush, after tourists enter Yosemite Valley in 1855, words and images of Yosemite quickly spread, and visitors begin pouring into the valley. One visitor said it is easy to imagine that he was standing “under the ruins of an old Gothic cathedral.” Another compared it to the churches of Cologne. Another quoted the Bible. Many noted that “peculiar exalted feeling” one gets in a place like Yosemite.

Ralph Waldo Emerson had been telling Americans: “God is more easily found in nature than in the works of man…here is sanctity which shames our religions.”

 

Henry David Thoreau said that we find our innocent self, our authenticity, in “little oases of wildness in the desert of our civilization.”

 

The message: “if you want to know God firsthand, go not to the cathedral but to the mountaintop.”

 

In a time when Americans were looking for their own identity in the arts and literature, this language reflects Americans’ desire to stake our claim in the history of civilization, to break new ground.

 

In his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman writes,

There will soon be no more priests. Their work is done. They may wait awhile…perhaps a generation or two…dropping off by degrees. A superior breed shall take their place…the gangs of kosmos and prophets en masse shall take their place. A new order shall arise and they shall be the priests of man, and every man shall be his own priest. The churches built under their umbrage shall be the churches of men and women. Through the divinity of themselves shall the kosmos and the new breed of poets be interpreters of men and women and of all events and things. They shall find their inspiration in real objects today….They shall arise in America and be responded to from the remainder of the earth.

 

Whitman is considered by many to be the “father” of modern American poetry.  He called for (and acted as) a new American poet that broke free from the forms and subjects of European poetry: “The American poets are to enclose old and new for America is the race of races. Of them a bard is to be commensurate with a people…His spirit responds to his country’s spirit…he incarnates its geography and natural life and rivers and lakes…The expression of the American poet is to be transcendent and new.” Through its poetry and through its preservation of wild places, Americans would offer the world something wholly new, something wholly American.

 

John Muir came from a strong Christian tradition, with a strict Presbyterian minister father who made him memorize the Bible. In his writing, the rhythm and cadences and word choice come from the Bible, but he established his own, new Christianity, which was “not about the worship of God but worship of God’s creation.”

In 1867 at the age of 29,  Muir walked for a distance of 1000 miles , from Louisville, Kentucky, to Cedar Key, Florida, in less than two months.On March 27, 1868, John Muir arrived in San Francisco from New York, by steamer. When he got off the boat in California, he was asked, “where do you wish to go?” He replied, “anywhere that’s wild.”  Muir then chose to walk to Yosemite. The act of walking created a faith for him, just as Thoreau suggested it might in his essay entitled “Walking” (where he says he favors walking West, which he aligns with “wildness”).

 

Muir came to work in, explore, and love Yosemite. He once drank water with a the cone of a sequoia, “to render myself more sequoiacal.” He became its greatest advocate and influenced the federal government’s decision in 1864 to set aside federal land in Yosemite so that it would be preserved for the enjoyment of all Americans and never transferred to private ownership (it would be under the care or the state of California before ultimately becoming a national park, a land transfer unheard of in human history.) Frederick Law Olmstead (landscape architect who designed Central Park) said that rich men “provide places of recreation for themselves, and the great mass of society is excluded.” He advocated steps by the government to keep this land “from the grasping hands of the individual.”

 

As for Muir, he left the wilderness for a time, moving to the city of Oakland, California, where he hoped to “spread the Gospel of Nature” and to “preach Nature like an apostle” through his writings for such publications as Harper’s. He married and for a time successfully managed his in-laws’ orange grove. But then he grew restless to travel again. Seeing how his work eroded him and nature replenished him, his wife convinced Muir to go back into nature, and ultimately “released” him from the duties of the farm and orchard (and home life). A climb up Mt. Rainier exhilarated him. A trip to Alaska with Klingit guides exposed him to Indian beliefs. His return to Yosemite revealed that his “cathedral” had been turned into a commercialized carnival. He spent years trying to convince Americans that “wildness is a necessity,” that commercial interests should not always take precedence over public.

 

Muir said: “We are now in the mountains and they are in us.” When he visited Alaska, he wrote, “Any man who does not believe in God and glaciers is the worst kind of unbeliever.”

On March 1, 1872, Yellowstone became the first national park in the history of the world. Muir pushed for Yosemite and other parts of the Sierra Nevada high country to be preserved as national parks. (Yosemite became a national park in 1890.) Muir spent many years pushing for more parks and bigger parks. Burns’ documentary says of Muir: “If Yosemite was a temple, he would become its high priest.” And “Everywhere he turned, he believed he was witnessing God who revealed himself through Nature.” Muir believed that by living wholly in civilization “we risk losing our souls.” We “recover ourselves, remember who we are, and connect with all that is sacred in ourselves” when we return to the wild.

 

Question: Can one be a “priest” of nature and part of a family and society as well? Or does it require severing ties with civilization?

Penn State Senior Seminar, Spring 2011, Instructor Alison Jaenicke