Issue 60: Bunny Takes the Reins
And Kerri Arsenault probes our diverse intimacies with the land
Dear Reader,
Happy Spring! Your long-lost correspondent is back. My current role at The Trustees has been extremely absorbing, and I have been missing the practice of writing to you. My thought is to adapt to a shorter format for the next little while and we’ll see how that goes. Thank you very much indeed for your patience.
I was tickled yesterday to come across this fanciful fresco (from Tivoli, in the 2nd century C.E. and now at the Louvre) of a rabbit charioteer driving a pair of geese. This little lapin does have quite a gleeful mien — perfect for these windy spring days, don’t you think? Wheeee!
Herewith a recent encounter with one of the great environmental writers working today.
Intimacies with the Land
This past week the writer and critic Kerri Arsenault joined our annual Trustees gathering of New York-area supporters to share some generous provocations and reflections. Kerri quoted from a Barry Lopez essay “Landscape and Narrative” and said:
The landscape within, or the inner landscape is what is contained in our moral, intellectual, spiritual selves. This inner landscape, is “a projection within a person of the exterior landscape”, meaning the shape of the mind is affected by landscape as much as it is by genes…and that when “interior landscape responds to the character and subtlety of an exterior landscape” there is a great intimacy that occurs. In other words, how our landscapes define us as much as we define them
I think of it how a tuning fork vibration can resonate deep inside your chest when your voice matches its pitch. A perfect “humming” – a harmony that mimics this intimacy Lopez writes of.
“There is a great intimacy that occurs.” I loved this idea, because I carry certain places inside me everywhere I go, and this intimacy is irrefutable, unyielding, lifelong. But could it be questioned? Or deepened?
Kerri complicated this idea of intimacy of place by stating another irrefutable claim. “If we apply what Lopez writes, Not all PEOPLE have the same relationship to a PLACE.” There can never be one intimacy, only myriad intimacies with a given place, and, of course, our non-human neighbors have their own.
In her book Mill Town: Reckoning with What Remains (see Frugal Chariot Issue 57), Kerri gives the example of the fight over Burt’s Bees founder Roxane Quimby’s efforts to amass 120,000 acres of forest land in Maine and donate most of them to the US Government and to the State of Maine for new national state parks.
When I first heard about Quimby’s idea, sometime in 2003, I reacted not unlike may people from Maine did—this is our state not hers. We liked the Woods just how they were, thank you very much. We could hunt, fish, snowmobile, hike, paddle, log, ski, camp, walk, and snowshoe with nobody telling us, in general, what to do. Private landowners, including timber companies, had allowed all of those things.
At The Trustees our mission to protect and share the Massachusetts places people love for their exceptional scenic, historic, and ecological value. And the reality is that people love our places in many different ways. Our fragile beach ecosystems are a great example. Some are ardent bird-lovers who urge us to restrict human (and pet) access to certain areas during the nesting season for rare shorebirds (as we are often required to do by law). Others love to fish and have multi-generational family traditions of driving their vehicles on these same beaches. Others prize solitude and quiet.
Every day, through the seasons, our staff works to balance all these human desires, with what we do our best to judge are the needs of the eco-systems we are care for. I have learned so much from listening to our staff share their intimacy with the reservations they steward. I have noticed that when I ask a question about land use there is often a deep pause before the answer. And that’s because the answer is often nuanced and hard-won through experience.
Kerri writes, “As I began to understand the issues better, and I grew to see the virtue and value in Quimby’s ideals and ideas. My small-mindedness leveled at tourists was a holdout from my past, a past responsible for ruining the landscape she was trying to protect.” To see the virtues in someone else’s joy, instead of resorting to negative, snap judgements, seems to be one small but fruitful way we might approach the task of living together more sustainably, to make our hummings into harmony. Thank you, Kerri.
Until next week!
xo Nicie