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).

The talk and screening is part of the US Environmental Film Festival, in its 18th year. For those of you who are enthusiasts for films about the people/nature connection, there are 155 diverse films screening between March 16th and 28th. Special programs exist for children and are marked by a family-friendly symbol in the festival program.

To care, we need to know. To know, we need to experience. If we cannot get outside enough, how will we ever care? Sometimes, a creative solution can bridge the generational and media gaps within a family. Like the one that the pastor Tri Robinson writes about in a chapter called The Garden Shed: Practical Ideas (from his book Saving God’s Green Earth).

“I asked people to enlarge personal pictures of them enjoying the outdoors and bring them to church for display in our lobby for an art exhibit. If people didn’t have any pictures, I encouraged them to get out there so they could take some.” Another way of knowing and talking about what’s happening outside.

It seems that science, as a procedure-of-observation, should be considered the essential map of WHAT changes are happening and WHAT to do to about them. But I believe that scientific information alone will not reverse the ways that humans are wrecking the planet. Faith communities are essential for this reversal to happen.

The basic meaning of this action term is that of a reduction or forced step-down in grade, rank, or status, with the sense of moving to a state of lesser quality. Additional meaning for this term, as used by some, includes a stepping down or lowering of moral quality (or character). Tracing the meaning of the term back to its Indo-European roots, we find the root ghredh- which means to walk, go. Other words which share this common root with degradation, with grade, include regress, progress, congress, and transgress. Synonyms include dishonor, discredit, shame, and disgrace.

Tomorrow, a clip from E.O. Wilson addresses the same question.

Tomorrow, I will post the reply of ecologist and evangelical leader Cal DeWitt. And then the reply of biologist E.O. Wilson. Collectively, these replies help convey a partial picture of American identity in the natural world.

The image at right was created in 1846 by the painter Edward Hicks, and can be viewed at the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

At that time, I knew the boy meant no disrespect for the reindeer. In fact, the opposite was the case. I knew that he and his family held their herd -their livelihood- in very high regard and were making a living as best they could.

There are a few places in America today where you might find this kind of child play in some form. Alaska, Montana, my own home state of Maine… places where a resource-based economy is alive or where people hunt and fish and farm.

The changing relationship to nature in America has many facets to explore. What is our understanding of what happens when animals die? How is that changing? For parents? For children? For a child at play?