“… most ranchers and farmers in the West care as much for the health of their land, air, and water as any member of the Sierra Club.” (Mark Dowie)

This was the second September in a row in which we decamped for two weeks to Point Reyes Station, California. The town, with a population of about 350, is in western Marin County, an hour north of San Francisco; it lies at the foot of Tomales Bay, which separates the Point Reyes peninsula from the mainland, and is a gateway to the Point Reyes National Seashore, some 70,000 acres of pristine beaches, rocky cliffs, historic dairy farms, redwood and eucalyptus trees, and tule elk. It is one of the most beautiful parts of a beautiful state, popular with hikers, kayakers, campers, horseback riders, and mountain bikers.

Point Reyes Station is also a foodie mecca, even by the rarefied standards of northern California. The nationally renowned Cowgirl Creamery is based here; the Saturday morning farmers’ market at Toby’s Feed Barn bears witness to the stunning variety and fertility of the surrounding farms and ranches; and the town features several fine restaurants, including Osteria Stellina, and a variety of enticing nearby dining options, including Saltwater, in nearby Inverness, and the renowned Hog Island Oysters, a few miles up Highway 1 on the eastern shore of the bay.

Natural beauty and agricultural plenty, plus a temperate climate: Point Reyes has it all. Even though Tomales Bay actually rests atop the dreaded San Andreas Fault, which means that there’s an excellent chance that it’s ground zero for the Next Big One, this may well be as close as we can get to an earthly paradise. All of which is by way of trying to put the controversy surrounding the Drakes Bay Oyster Company, which harvests more than a third of the state’s oysters, in some kind of context.

People have been harvesting oysters commercially in the waters of Drakes Estero, an estuary on the southern edge of the Point Reyes peninsula, for more than a century; President Kennedy signed the bill creating the Point Reyes National Seashore in 1962, and ten years later the government paid the Johnson Oyster Company nearly $80,000 for the property for inclusion in the park, offering the company a forty-year nonrenewable permit to continue operating.

In 1976, Congress passed a law designating the 2,500 acres of tidelands and submerged land of Drakes Estero as a marine wilderness effective upon the termination of that permit. In 2004, the Johnsons sold out to the Lunny family, longtime local cattle ranchers, who continued operating as the Drakes Bay Oyster Company; apparently the Lunnys assumed that the government would let them continue harvesting oysters in the estuary past 2012, even though the government told them that “no new permit will be issued.”

In November 2012, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar formally announced that he was allowing the permit to expire, though various court orders allowed the company to keep operating. Last week, however, a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. District Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the federal government was within its authority in terminating the permit. The next step is uncertain, though the company will probably seek a hearing before the full court.

The case has become something of a cause célèbre in normally mellow Marin. While the Interior Department tries to do what’s right from a national perspective, fulfilling a Congressional directive and following the letter of the law, Point Reyes Station and the surrounding rural areas are thick with hand-painted blue-and-white signs begging “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm”—hardly surprising, I suppose, given the fact that the Lunny family has been here for a century, and the general antipathy toward Big Government among small farmers and ranchers. Supporters of the company have even started a Website, SaveOurShellfish.com, which is full of populist fervor, arguing that the feds “are illegally denying Californians their rights to shellfish cultivation in Drake’s [sic] Estero” and urging people to “Join us in standing up for the People’s right to this remarkable food source!”

The company’s own Website makes much of the Lunnys’ commitment to environmentally sound practices. Its mission statement reads, in part, “All of our growing, post harvest and delivery practices are built around sound and sustainable agricultural practices with ecological responsibility and a long-standing attitude of stewardship for the land and sea that we farm.” A number of local restaurants and farm bureaus have weighed in on the company’s side. The legendary Alice Waters of Chez Panisse noted the importance of “a community of scores of local farmers and ranchers, such as the Lunnys, whose dedication to sustainable aquaculture and agriculture assures the restaurant a steady supply of fresh and pure ingredients.”

Meanwhile, critics of the Lunnys argue that they have not always lived up to their lofty claims. The California Coastal Commission charged the company with “illegal coastal development, violation of harbor seal protection measures, and failure to control significant amounts of its plastic pollution.” Various environmental groups have arrayed themselves on the government’s side. Neal Desai of the National Parks Conservation Association said that the decision “affirms that our national parks will be safe from privatization schemes, and that special places like Drakes Estero will rise above attempts to hijack America’s wilderness.” A Huffington Post story noted that the Washington nonprofit providing the company with pro bono legal representation had ties to the arch-conservative Koch brothers and was a front for the nationwide effort to open public lands to private exploitation.

It is impossible for an outsider like me to know what to make of all this; the controversy quickly becomes a morass of he said, she said charges and countercharges. Without knowing the details of the situation or the principals involved it is impossible to tell where the objective truth lies, if there is such a thing—which is, I grant you, a pretty big if. It seems, however, that each side has come to believe the worst about the other.

When I was a kid growing up in Mill Valley, Marin County was a byword for a laid-back lifestyle. Beads, patchouli, incense, peacock feathers, and—I admit it—large quantities of high-quality dope were part of the equation, as was one of the highest per-capita incomes in the country, and while it has always been easy to make fun of “Mellow Marin” (see Cyra McFadden’s The Serial: A Year in the Life of Marin County, for example), many people here seem genuinely committed to living in gentle harmony with each other and with Mother Nature.

Mark Dowie is an environmental journalist who lives on the western shore of Tomales Bay. In the latest issue of the West Marin Review, he writes: “I remain an environmentalist. I believe we all are at heart. But I’m a hybrid, a fence-sitter, observed with caution by ranchers and Greens alike. I’ve lost a few friends on both sides of that fence.”

He adds, “The science of land stewardship is still unfolding and it’s hard to know what’s right. But it seems clear that one right thing is communication. Close, patient, and honest dialogue between ranchers and enviros will make great strides toward right-stewardship and toward consensus in the land disputes that plague the West. Those conversations are often best had around kitchen tables.”

Given the apparent intransigence, suspicion, and bitterness on both sides, the opponents in this controversy aren’t close to sitting down at the kitchen table together; hell, they’re not even in the same building, figuratively. (Literally, it’s a different story: a block from the house we rented is a 114-year-old former livery stable with one of those blue-and-white “Save Our Drakes Bay Oyster Farm” signs on the wall facing Third Street, and in that building is the office of the Environmental Action Committee of West Marin, which supports the decision to close the company down.)

Perhaps I’m being childish, but I can’t help wishing, with Dowie, that the locavores and the environmentalists could find common ground. This is a special and beautiful place, and it shouldn’t be that hard to agree on the need to keep it that way. But right now “Mellow Marin” seems a little less mellow, a little more like the rest of the world, and that’s a shame.

What we’re reading
Heather: Andrea Barrett, Servants of the Map
Martin: Edmund de Waal, The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance

While reading the recently published Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World, by Emma Marris, I found myself simultaneously cheering and exclaiming with a steely squint: Hey! Real conservationists can’t think this! You’re just giving ammunition for them to lob back at us. Slippery slope turns to avalanche turns into apocalypse! Who the heck to do you think you are?

Now that I’ve finished the book, I’ve decided to go back to applauding Marris for her cheerful heterodoxy and passionately common-sensical approach to conservation issues in the brave new world of the twenty-first century. I began reading with no problems. In the first chapter she says,

Nature is almost everywhere. But wherever it is, there is one thing it is not: pristine. In 2011 there is no pristine wilderness on planet Earth…. [Humans are] running the whole Earth, whether we admit it or not. To run it consciously and effectively, we must admit our role and even embrace it. We must temper our romantic notions of untrammeled wilderness and find room next to it for the more nuanced notion of a global, half-wild rambunctious garden, tended to by us.

So far so good. Recent climate change and the cascade of new realities resulting from it are clear to virtually every scientist and conservation-minded person on the planet. (Insert punchline about Texans and their three-term governor here.) She explains that environmental sciences, especially in the United States, use a baseline, a reference point which, in formulating conservation goals tends to assume an ideal time of pristine, stable wilderness to which nature itself yearns to return, hearkening to a time before the destabilizing pressures of human occupancy. We fouled nature up, so it’s our ethical duty to restore it to its original, Edenic state.

But then she makes things really messy. From what point do we date human occupancy for the sake of conservation goals? And where? Many scientists assume that the time before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas is the time to which we must reset the clock. This is the baseline that many conservation-minded Americans (like me) also assume, most likely unquestioningly (like me). (One of the reasons I call myself a utopian—i.e., not a realist—is my hope, expressed in an earlier post, that human stewardship, particularly by ranchers, might at some point not be the worst thing that ever happened to the Earth.) First of all, religious fundamentalists aren’t the only ones to believe that the Garden of Eden existed as a historical reality. The idea that there has ever been a stable, self-perpetuating ecosystem is problematic:

We are a short-lived species with a notoriously bad grasp of timescales longer than a few of our own generations. But from the point of view of a geologist or a paleontologist, ecosystems are in a constant dance, as their components compete, react, evolve, migrate, and form new communities. Geologic upheaval, evolution, climactic cycles, fire, storms, and population dynamics see to it that nature is always changing.

Nor do scientists always know what any particular ecosystem actually looked like at any pre-baseline time. Nor does the Edenic model take into account the fact that many native peoples had purposeful management systems before the arrival of Europeans. Finally, this baseline is also increasingly impossible to achieve, either through restoration or management practices, because the pressures of climate change and population growth have made turning back the clock about as feasible as stuffing a sixteen-year-old boy into the shoes he wore when he was eight. It isn’t going to happen, especially if he didn’t actually have any shoes when he was eight.

The pristine wilderness toward which so many conservationists aspire is, in fact, an American construction that came into being along with Yellowstone National Park and the science of the nineteenth century, which saw nature as essentially balanced, static, unchanging in its equilibrium. Contemporary environmental sciences clearly demonstrate that the natural world—before human “interference”—never stood still for long. Some of the most revered natural phenomena—old growth forests, for example—can be the result of climactic anomalies, like long wet spells that interrupted wildfires cycles. And what do we do about issues like the mountain goats at Yellowstone, which are now beloved by tourists, but were introduced from several hundred miles away in the 1940s for hunting purposes?

Well, I can cope with the reality that the Wizard of Oz is actually working levers behind a curtain, even as I’d like to be able to ignore him. But one of the unexpected revelations of that unveiling really hooked me under the ribs: the chapter entitled “Learning to Love Exotic Species.” I have often moaned and groaned about the non-native fauna—the fallow, axis, and sika deer, the feral hogs, and the various other oddities—that wander through Madroño Ranch and compete for food with the natives, especially in this drought time. I’m also a member of an advisory board to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, the mission of which is “to increase the sustainable use and conservation of native wildflowers, plants and landscapes.” I recently sat in on an excellent and nuanced presentation on invasive species by Damon Waitt, the director of the center’s Native Plant Information Network. I know as surely as I know that north is up and south is down that natives are good and that invasives are bad. But Marris upends the poles and says, think again. Non-natives can be not only not malevolent but actively useful. While some exotic species (a term she prefers to “invasives”) are “rowdy nuisances” that need active and emphatic controlling, there are far more “shy foreigners” who work for the good of their new ecosystems. In fact, there are human-managed—that is, artificial—landscapes filled with exotic species that outperform their “natural” cousins, if performance is measured by biodiversity and provisions of services to all inhabitants and not just humans.

This is when I began to ask the “just who does she think she is” question with my arms akimbo, which is when I realized it wasn’t my scientific, based-on-facts knowledge that was being challenged (it doesn’t take much); rather, it was my own self-identity as a conservation-minded layperson. I was adhering to an orthodoxy I hadn’t realized I subscribed to. I learned at my mother’s knee that any orthodoxy’s tires need a good kicking before you buy. I had climbed into this orthodoxy (a Prius, naturally) without doing so and found that I might be stuck on the side of the road with a flat.

In Marris’s rambunctious garden, however, the side of the road might not be a bad place to be stuck. If it were managed for biodiversity, for beauty, and as a part of a much larger ecosystem—as a stop for migratory butterflies, for example—a stranded motorist might enjoy the wait for help. We’re so used to thinking of “nature” as something outsized and grand and hard to get to that we frequently forget that it’s quite literally underfoot or falling on our sleeves as we walk along a city sidewalk. While it’s not entirely within our control, there are more ways for human being to engage in a fruitful relationship with nature than we currently allow ourselves to imagine.

Marris’s call for biodiversity everywhere—in industrial sites, apparent wastelands, back yards, hybrid ecosystems developed for economic gain—made me realize that unexamined orthodoxy often leads to monoculture, be it agricultural, social, political, intellectual, or spiritual. In industrial agriculture, monocultures rely heavily on pesticides, ridding crops of insects that in a healthy polyculture can be absorbed into the system (sometimes requiring intensive human labor). In the national discussion about immigration, there seems to be a sector demanding social monoculture, using terms that sound very much like the prejudice in environmental circles against “invasive” species. The extremes in both political parties are demanding that their candidates spray any bipartisan thoughts with herbicide. When she first messed with my assumptions, I mentally doused Marris’s proprosals, hoping the threat to my preconceptions would go away. Despite the huge short-term returns of monoculture (in my case, the sure knowledge that I was right), the reality of radically diminished liveliness looms just past the identical crop rows. Re-wilding monocultures of the mind, the heart, and the land—acknowledging that there is no single solution to any complex problem—sounds like a critical strategy in the face of what sometimes feels like a threatening future. According to Marris, it’s our duty to manage nature, but it’s a duty leading to pleasure, beauty, and liveliness. As she urges, “Let the rambunctious gardening begin.”

What we’re reading
Heather: Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World
Martin: H. W. Brands, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt

I have a bone to pick with Freeman Dyson, professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and generally acknowledged scientific genius. I bet he’s really nervous.

On a recent trip to Aspen, I picked up The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2010, edited by Dyson, and the latest installment in a wonderful series that began in 2000. In the introduction, Dyson laments that most current science writing appears as brief news items rather than “thoughtful essays” like the ones John McPhee wrote for The New Yorker. Apparently magazine editors don’t feel that science as science has much reader appeal. Nature writing is much more common; Dyson notes that the book contains twice as many essays about nature as about science. “Nature is now fashionable among readers and publishers of magazines,” he grumbles. “Science is unfashionable.”

Somewhat later he claims that the essays about nature are “written for nature lovers, not science lovers,” because “the quality of the writing is as important as the subject matter.” The environmental movement is the product not of science, but is rather the “leading secular religion of our age,” a replacement for Marxism. “Environmentalism doesn’t have much to do with science,” he says, although he proudly shares the ethics of the environmental movement. He is hopeful about the future of the Earth because two such committed communities are “working to preserve living space for our fellow creatures….”

While his analysis is in some ways perfectly reasonable, I object to the idea that there is an unbreachable demarcation between science and other disciplines rather than a permeable boundary that encourages heavy traffic and frequent discussion about just exactly where that boundary is, particularly between the sciences and the arts. (I include religion in the realm of art for purposes of this essay.)

Subsequent events since I read Dyson’s introduction have encouraged me to continue this line of thought. Maggie Fox, CEO of the Climate Protection Action Fund, was the featured speaker at the recent Jessica Catto Leadership Dialogues, a program of the Aspen Center for Environmental Studies. She opened her talk by suggesting that the bar code would be the symbol for this era; technology, media, and advertising have converged in such a way that we are encouraged in all arenas to chose what we already know and prefer and to live in a bubble that reflects our predispositions. She urged us to step out of our silos both inside and outside the environmental community and to refuse to identify too exclusively with what we already know.

The day after this talk I read an article in The Atlantic Monthly entitled “The Triumph of New-Age Medicine,” by David H. Freedman, that investigates the rise—and apparent efficacy—of alternative, or integrative, or holistic medical practices in America. Mainstream medicine has a mixed reaction to this turn of events. Freedman quotes one doctor willing to consider integrative medicine’s benefits as saying, “Doctors tend to end up trained in silos of specialization.” Those who object to alternative medicine as hokum can be virulently negative about it, despite the opening in recent years of forty-two integrative medical research centers, all of them at major medical institutions like Harvard, Yale, Duke, and the Mayo Clinic. Says one critic, “It’s cleverly marketed, dangerous quackery…. There’s only one type of medicine, and that’s medicine whose treatments have been proven to work. When something works, it’s not all that hard to prove it. These people have been trying to prove their alternative treatments work for years, and they can’t do it.”

From there, Freedman takes a look at what constitutes “proof” in mainstream medicine. He interviews a Harvard researcher who claims that many mainstream medical treatments are little better than placebos. Says Freedman, “The vast majority of drugs don’t work in as many as 70 percent of patients, according to a study within the pharmaceutical industry. One recent study concluded that 85 percent of new prescription drugs hitting the market are of little or no benefit to patients.” But patients keep buying them, because, according to the researcher, “knowing that you’re getting a treatment is a critical part of the ritual of seeing any kind of practitioner.”

It appears, then, that effective treatment relies in part on patients’ perceptions and expectations, two things that are notoriously resistant to empirical testing. The belief that treatment will be efficacious is frequently augmented by a solid relationship between healer and patient. Freedman says that studies “have even shown that patients still get a beneficial placebo effect when practitioners are honest but optimistic with patients about the placebo—saying something along the lines of ‘We know of no reason why this should work, yet it seems to work with many patients.’ Sure enough, it often does.”

Freedman also interviewed a neuroscientist at the University of California at Davis who studies the effects of meditation on the brain and who said, “We have to be careful about allowing presumed objective scientific methods to trump all aspects of human experience. Instead, science has to learn to listen in a sophisticated way to what individuals report to us, and to relate those findings to other kinds of knowledge obtained from external measurements.” This, of course, was my takeaway from the article, which deserves to be read in its entirety and not just in my messily truncated version of it.

After reading this article, I attended a concert in the Aspen Music Festival summer series featuring Beethoven’s third piano concerto. My father and I sat where we could watch Joyce Yang, the soloist, as she played this beautifully complex and lyrical piece. I’m not able to judge whether it was a flawless performance (it certainly seemed like one), but it was utterly riveting. Her performance took a series of givens, of facts, that any performer of the piece faces: the piano, the musical score, the liturgies required in a concert performance, and technical mastery over all of them. These givens, in combination with Yang’s ebullient, unmeasurable, unprovable subjective self, brought forth something beautifully new and of soul-jolting clarity. She was the vehicle of a kind of revelation.

Dyson himself recounted in his own career as a physicist a moment that sounds to me analogous to Yang’s performance. A 2009 profile in The New York Times Magazine entitled “The Civil Heretic” described how he solved a particularly difficult problem given to him by a professor, a subset of a larger problem Einstein had proposed. Dyson had just parted from the brilliant physicist Richard Feynman, with whom he’d been on a road trip through America:

Inspired by this and by a mesmerizing sermon on nonviolence that Dyson happened to hear a traveling divinity student deliver in Berkeley, Dyson sat aboard his final Greyhound of the summer, heading East. He had no pencil or paper. He was thinking very hard. On a bumpy stretch of highway, long after dark, somewhere out in the middle of Nebraska, Dyson says, “Suddenly the physics problem became clear.”

The intersection of the givens of the discipline of physics with Dyson’s unmeasurable, subjective self brought about something new, a revelation. Perhaps the masters of any discipline are more like each other than they are like the competent workers within their disciplines, the people who move a discipline forward without changing its course.

Which gets me back to my irritation with Dyson’s silo-ing off of science writing from nature writing and environmental writing. Of course there are nature/environmental writers whose grasp of science is negligible (like me), whose substitution of sentiment for rigorous thinking is exasperating, whose awareness of the history of nature writing is minimal, or whose identification with a political orthodoxy is absolute. But there are also nature and environmental writers who marry mastery of their craft with their unmeasurable, subjective selves in such a way that something compellingly new arises, something revelatory about the not always entirely overlapping human and natural worlds.

Even as I was reading the new Best of, I was also reading Writing the Sacred into the Real, a compilation of essays on beloved places by poet Alison Hawthorne Deming. The quality of her writing is as important as her subject matter, a statement which Dyson would not necessarily intend as a compliment. I’m not sure why he would exclude scientists from the pleasure of reading her essays, which are as much reflections on writing as they are on nature; she is not a scientist but has read and reflected on science, and it informs her observations without being their subject matter. Her subject matter is the ways in which Americans have been shaped by the natural world, even as much of American culture becomes more removed from it and, consequently, careless in its stewardship. Her purpose is to make us look, really look, at our surroundings: “The human eye does more than see; it stitches the seen and the unseen together, the temporal and the eternal. It wakes me again and again to the astonishment of finding myself in a body moving through a world of beauty and dying and mystery.” She insists on the power and presence of the invisible in human experience, on the ways in which a deep, focused involvement with nature leads to a glimmer of understanding that surpasses the sum of its parts:

For me, the natural world in all its evolutionary splendor is a revelation of the divine—the inviolable matrix of cause and effect that reveals itself to us in what we cannot control or manipulate, no matter how pervasive our meddling. This is the reason that our technological mastery over nature will always remain flawed. The matrix is more complex than our intelligence. We may control a part, but the whole body of nature must incorporate the change, and we are not capable of anticipating how it will do so. We will always be humbled before nature, even as we destroy it. And to diminish nature beyond its capacity to restore itself, as our culture seems perversely bent to do, is to desecrate the sacred force of Earth to which we owe a gentler hand.

This doesn’t sound all that different from what Einstein said about his sense of faith:

A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and in this alone, I am a deeply religious man…. Enough for me the mystery of the eternity of life, and the inkling of the marvelous structure of reality, together with the single-hearted endeavor to comprehend a portion, be it ever so tiny, of the reason that manifests itself in nature.

These two masters of distinct disciplines sound very much like each other. Given what I’ve read of and by Dyson, I don’t think he would disagree with me, or them. There seems, however, to be within many disciplines a tendency to defend their boundaries with a tribal fierceness, a tendency that Dyson exhibits in his introduction. I hope that the masters of all disciplines find ways to seek each other out and investigate their common ground rather than defend their own turf—not a bad exercise for the drones, either.

What we’re reading
Heather: Alison Hawthorne Deming, Writing the Sacred into the Real
Martin: Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows

We have spared no expense in securing the services of an ace guest blogger this week while we recuperate from our thirtieth college reunion in Massachusetts. Below, Thea Kohout offers some reflections on the importance, and scarcity, of stillness.

I know that there have already been several posts on this blog about my grandmother Jessica Hobby Catto (who insisted that we all call her Tia, which means “aunt” in Spanish, since she was far too young to be a grandmother), but I’m going to talk about her again because she was one of the smartest people I ever met, and she gave me some of the best advice I’ve ever received.

A few months before Tia died, my mom and I were up in Colorado visiting her and the rest of my mom’s family. On this day, Tia had had a rough morning and was in bed resting when we came by. By that point, she was already visibly a very sick woman, and it was hard for me to see her like that because for my entire life, she had been a larger-than-life matriarchal presence, perpetually strong and in charge. But now she was thinner, quieter, more brittle, and I could see her chemo port, hard and unforgiving, pushing against the fragile skin of her chest.

I had been wandering around the house and yard as she and my mom talked, running my hands over the familiar tchotchkes and books I had grown up with, when Tia called me back to her bedroom. She was sitting up in bed waiting for me and patted the spot on the bed next to her, so I hopped up. This was the summer before my senior year of high school and I was jittery and restless about my imminent “adulthood.” She asked me what I was going to be doing for the rest of the summer and I rattled off my list of daily musical rehearsals, college applications, summer reading, essays, choir practices, etc. She stared at me and then said, “You know what your problem is?” Taken aback, I shook my head, unaware that I had a problem. “You don’t know how to be still. You don’t know how to not be constantly doing something. And it’s important that you know how to do that.”

This was one of our last one-on-one conversations, and in the chaos that followed her death that fall, I kept coming back to it, because it finally started to make sense.

Our world is one of fast-paced, fast-talking progress. We’re told we need technology, urbanization, corporations, government participation in everything. Everything is in constant forward motion and I get it: productivity comes from hard, dedicated work. But I can’t help noticing that a lot of people seem to be missing something, and I think that what Tia told me is it: somewhere, we lost the capacity for reflection and quietness. Jean de La Bruyère once said that all of our unhappiness comes from our inability to be alone, and I think he is totally right. Which is why I think what my parents are doing at Madroño Ranch is so important: it gives you a chance to be still.

I’m nineteen years old. Madroño Ranch became a part of our lives when I was a year old, so I’ve been coming out here since before I can remember for Thanksgiving, New Year’s, summer, birthdays, long weekends, and various and sundry other events. As I’ve grown and as Madroño’s purpose in our lives has evolved, so have my perceptions of the place. When I was little, going out to the ranch was only fun if I had siblings or friends or cousins coming with me to swim with me, jump on the trampoline with me, play in the treehouse with me, and sleep in the bunkroom with me. Going out with just my parents was boring and while I appreciated having a place to go when I got tired of being in a city, I avoided going without guests.

With my grandmother’s wise words, however, came a change. Madroño began to teach me how to be still and how to be by myself among its quiet caliche roads, its shallow creeks and fairy waterfalls, its birds and butterflies, its wide blue skies. I’ve always thought the Hill Country was pleasant, but with this newfound knowledge I began to see its real beauty. I think of myself as an extremist; I like everything to be at one pole or the other. This explains my love of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado (there is absolutely nothing subtle about their soaring, staggering, jagged, heart-catching splendor), and also why I prefer Beethoven to Bach and Kahlo to Bouguereau. Spending time in solitude out at Madroño has gotten me to realize that beauty can be found in the tiniest things, like dewdrops on tiny purple flowers growing between cracks in rock, or the way sunlight seems to shatter and spark on the surface of a lake, or a birdsong wavering through gray-purple fog on a winter morning.

It’s easy to forget how important it is to put aside time to reflect. The rise of cell phones, email, social networking sites, and even the push to live in urban and suburban areas has gradually instilled in us a fear of being alone. We’re all hyper-connected to people all over the globe and, yes, it’s incredible that we can stay in contact with people we love so easily, but it’s just as incredible to be temporarily unplugged from all that. With this kind of reflection comes inspiration, and with inspiration comes true progress. The word inspiration literally means the act of breathing in, and I can’t think of a more perfect place to inspire than out in nature, alone and breathing.

What we’re reading
Heather: Gary Snyder, A Place in Space: Ethics, Aesthetics, and Watersheds
Martin: Lewis Hyde, The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World

Confession: I consider myself a loyal son of alma mater, but I usually just skim the quarterly Williams Alumni Review before tossing it into the recycling pile. A story in the June issue, however, caught my eye. “The Literary Environment,” by Denise DiFulco, is about the director of the college’s Center for Environmental Studies (CES), a Spanish professor named, confusingly, Jennifer French.

The article notes that a lot of people have asked French how a Spanish professor came to be named the director of the CES. The answer involves her first book, Nature, Neo-Colonialism, and the Spanish American Regional Writers (2005), which examined early twentieth century Latin American literary responses to European economic hegemony in the region. Or something like that. Explains French, “Often those writers, including Horacio Quiroga and José Eustasio Rivera, made central to their narratives the deleterious effects of agriculture and other industries.”

Sadly, I know next to nothing about Latin American literature, and I’d never heard of Quiroga or Rivera, but another quotation from the article really struck me: “At their best, environmental history, philosophy, religion, literary studies, and the like engage the underlying assumptions of environmental policy and environmental science.”

Exactly! I thought. This is a view that resonates profoundly with Heather and me—we are, after all, both English majors—and when we eventually begin accepting environmental writers for residencies at Madroño Ranch, we hope to cast as wide a net as possible.

Say the words “environmental writer” and I suspect that most people think of folks like Bill McKibben or William Cronon or Michael Pollan or David Quammen (all of whom happen to be heroes of ours): essayists or historians with a biological or agricultural bent. They, and many others like them, are among the most important writers we have, and we would be thrilled—thrilled—to have them, or their peers, as residents at Madroño. But we also hope to attract novelists and poets and philosophers and theologians and playwrights and screenwriters and memoirists and perhaps even (what the heck) bloggers—pretty much anyone who’s thinking and writing in creative ways about the land and those who have their being on it, and how they affect each other.

Think of the fiction of Wendell Berry, who (much as William Faulkner did in Mississippi) has created a complex and compelling imaginary landscape in Kentucky. (Apparently the American South is particularly suited to this sort of exercise.) Think of the novels of Willa Cather—Death Comes for the Archbishop is still my favorite—and Wallace Stegner, which depict the varied experiences of humans confronted with the vast spaces of the American West. Think of the poetry of Mary Oliver, in which the animal and vegetal and geological is a constant, almost sentient presence, and W. S. Merwin, described in the New York Times as “a fierce critic of the ecological damage humans have wrought.” Think of the economic writings of Paul Hawken and Woody Tasch, critiques of modern industrial capitalism’s obsession with short-term, bottom-line profit at the expense of just about everything else. Heck, think of David Winner’s odd little book Brilliant Orange: The Neurotic Genius of Dutch Football—one of my personal favorites—in which he examines how landscape has affected the style of soccer played in the Netherlands.

Closer to home, think of the gracious and elegant memoirs of John Graves and Roy Bedichek, two of the foundational texts of the environmental movement in Texas; or the beginning of The Path to Power, the first volume of Robert Caro’s epic three-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still the best short history of the Texas Hill Country I’ve ever read; or even Witold Rybczynski’s magisterial biography of Frederick Law Olmsted—not a Texan, but an astute observer of the state—which is a wonderful narrative summary of nineteenth-century American thought about nature in urban and suburban settings. Each of these works, I believe, has something original and important to say about community in America, community in this case defined as (to crib shamelessly from Pollan’s website) “the places where nature and culture intersect.”

We’d be pretty surprised to receive applications from Faulkner, Cather, Stegner, or Bedichek, since they’re, well, dead. But would the rest of them want to come to Madroño Ranch? Well, why not? We hope that the offer of beautiful and rugged surroundings, free from distraction, in which to ponder and dream and focus and unfocus (and eat well, of course; let’s not forget eating well) and bounce ideas off peers, will prove irresistible. Are we aiming high? Of course; but if you don’t aim high, you’ll just keep hitting the ground, right? Who knows—maybe Jennifer French herself will want to come. According to the article, she’s already working on her next book, a study of how memories of the War of the Triple Alliance (fought between Paraguay and the combined forces of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay from 1864 to 1870) have influenced attitudes toward land use in Paraguay. Wouldn’t that be cool?

What we’re reading
Heather: Laurie King, Touchstone
Martin: Paul Hawken, The Ecology of Commerce: A Declaration of Sustainability (still)