Came across the following by environmental journalist Paul Voosen this morning.

“Historically, the push behind conservation has been a love of nature,” said Wiens, the former conservancy scientist. “Translated, there’s a sort of religious underpinning to that. It’s our moral obligation to protect all living creatures. And it’s still a strong feeling in the movement, that everything is important.”

A decade ago, though, the Nature Conservancy saw this love of nature fading. Young, mostly city-dwelling Americans don’t go hunting, fishing or camping as they did in the past. Between 2004 and 2009, the group saw a 10-point drop in self-identified environmentalists.”

Our interviewees are very much in the news of late.  E.O. Wilson has a new book coming out.  Last month, writes Elizabeth Grossman in Yale Environment 360, ‘…12 scientists – including such experts as [Theo] Colborn and the University of Missouri’s Frederick vom Saal – published a paper…their research, based on a review of 800 scientific studies, concludes that it is “remarkably common” for very small amounts of hormone-disrupting chemicals to have profound, adverse effects on human health.’

Our timelapse and landscape talent Eleanor is also a history buff. She made some observations about the stonewalls that we found in South Hope with the last timelapse we shot. Building stonewalls are experiences of Americana, of who we are and where we came from, in the big picture of the stone and wood we’ve literally held in our hands over the years. E.O. Wilson differentiates the living creation from the non-living creation. With this lead, my interests in this filmic inquiry are primarily with the living. But the American divorce from nature runs deeper than that.

FROM ELEANOR: “Rarely in need of replacement, constructing stone walls were massive undertakings. This is one reason why they are so familiar in the earliest settled regions of the country, like South Hope Maine, where the frontier mentality had yet to take hold: unlike their children and grandchildren, these farmers expected to spend their entire lives on a single plot of land. A worker could lay between twenty four and sixty four feet of wall per day, assuming that the stones, or “fieldstones,” as they were called, had already been transported to the building site.

Historian John Stilgoe notes that wooden fences, which became the popular barrier among farmers outside of the northeastern US, were replaced every fifteen to thirty years. When in the early nineteenth century, depleted woodlots triggered a timber shortage, it was the stone wall laying farmers that had enough wood to keep their fires burning. Of course, it was also these northernmost people who, hibernating from frigid temperatures, were most in need of firewood.”

For more information on the life and times of stonewalls, see: Robert Thorson, Stone by Stone: The Magnificent History in New England’s Stone Walls (Walker & Company, 2004).
John R. Stilgoe, Common Landscape of America, 1580-1845 (Yale University Press, 1983).

Just returned from a multi-day canoe trip with my son, exploring the North Woods of New England.

Here, on the shore of Lake Umbagog.

I watch him sitting at sunset and recall lyrics from a song that asks a question…”If you knew that you would die today, would you change? Would you change?”

My son, on the other hand, awakes the next morning and marvels at the movement of light and small fish within shallow water.

Today a letter arrived from a viewer of our series Sunrise Earth, written and sent by a young man age 7 from Greensboro NC. I wonder what motivated this note. A theory for Stonehenge? A spirit? Trapped by whom? The art critic Bernard Berenson might call this “the natural genius of childhood and ‘the spirit of place.’ … but probably not, since it was an experience mediated through a screen. Far better for this young viewer to be physically at a place. I wonder where he plays in Greensboro?

But the note did recall this unusual place and the morning we spent there. We had rented Stonehenge, so that we could record and convey these stones without the crowds… and only with the breaking sun and clouds and the small birds called jackdaws that live within the cracks of the stones. Maybe the young viewer -or his cat- noticed the birds?

Stone is an incredible medium. When I stop making movies, I’d like to carve letters into stone, then narrowcast them into the back woods.