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).

Another blog entry from Eleanor…

“As the sun rose red this morning on the eve of an approaching hurricane that is making its way up the edges of the Eastern seaboard, I am reminded of the feeling of the familiar “calm before the storm,” and the anticipation of the violent weather that might follow.

While today I look to the concrete weather models and primarily recognize storm systems as scientific acts of nature, in 1620 William Bradford looked elsewhere for understanding. He recorded how after one particular storm subsided, “the lord filled their afflicted minds with such comforts as every one cannot understand, and in the end brought them to their desired Heaven, where the people came flocking admiring their deliverance.” Bradford’s Mayflower crew saw the weather on their Atlantic crossing as an act of God.

Perhaps it is in the eye of the storm that I have the potential to be humbled by the experiences of my forbearers, experiences that were carried out not on the faith of forecasts but on faith alone.”

Considering the workings of dialogue among those people who work with the new biology and those of faith, while preparing the soil for this season’s family vegetable garden. Last year, a blight took out the tomato crop. This year I imagine the sungolds from years past.