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).

I will be screening clips and speaking about this work-in-progress BEHOLD THE EARTH on Sunday at 2:45pm, at the Baird Auditorium of the Smithsonian’s Museum of Natural History. Please come if you are in the Washington area this weekend and curious to learn what the production is all about.

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.

Simply noticing and recording the disturbing trends of a degraded world is a virtue of science and all those practicing it. The process reveals a lot of information about the world around us. But information alone is not enough to mobilize action on the scale required to make that world a healthier and more desirable place for our children. A set of political relationships with this, that, or the other political party is not enough. Nor are relationships in the marketplace. Nor a broad appeal to beauty. In the video clip below, the writer Carl Safina speaks about the kind of relationship he believes is required.

“If you had as much fun stuff to do inside when you were a kid, you’d have been inside more too!” This is a memorable comment from an eleven year old boy to his father, an accomplished fisherman and outdoorsman here on the coast of Maine. That father is a friend of mine. His son, a friend of my son’s. Often, I’ve found myself mulling over its significance, within my own household. Pretty astute comment, actually. Aside from the lure of television, not much interesting DID happen inside when we were kids.

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.

I am reminded of what Cal DeWitt said to me about science. “Science is a way of knowing, a process, not a body of knowledge in its own right.” Many are in consensus on this point, but this agreement is often overlooked or misunderstood in the essential dialogue that needs to happen between scientists and people of faith. People of faith, of course, look at faith as a way of knowing the world -in part- but also as much, much more. This clip from Ed Wilson is a thought on how science can address the human degradations of the earth.

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.