A "Tree View" Revisted: Loree Rackstraw

A “TREE VIEW” REVISITED:

SPECULATIONS ON THE FUTURE OF LIFE ON EARTH

Supper Club Speech

March 23, 2010

Pulitzer Prize winning author, Marilynne Robinson, recently observed that “Nothing could be more miraculous than that we have a consciousness that makes the world intelligible to us and we are moved by what is beautiful.”

I was moved by that statement, and found it interestingly parallel to the view of the late author Joseph Campbell, who wrote The Power of Myth. Campbell famously revealed that “myths are metaphors of spiritual potentiality in the human being… the same powers that animate our life animate the life of the world.”

This past summer I was invited by the organization called Humanities Iowa to discuss how Iowa had influenced my writing. That led me to focus on just what it is that animates my life and has helped make my world intelligible. I found it a rewarding effort I’d like to share with you tonight.

Since I’ve lived in Iowa most of my lifetime I began with my earliest memories, recalling my concerns as a five year old during the time of the Great Depression. I had moved with my parents to Forest City, Iowa, in 1935, where my father had a new job -- I think with a loan company -- which often required his absence from home. My mother’s pregnancy at that time was complicated by fragile health. Whenever I felt frightened or lonely, what always comforted me was playing outdoors in the sensory beauty of trees and birds and butterflies. Three plump goldfish lived in a little pond in our shady backyard. If I held bread crumbs near the pond’s surface, the fish nibbled from my fingers. They were my first friends in Forest City, a town so-named because of its plentiful wooded areas.

Once kindergarten began, I would pretend to read stories to my fish like my teacher did to our class. Our wonderfully kind teacher was Miss Fahr, who even let us children tell our own stories.

The first time it was my turn to tell a story in class, I told about my Native American grandfather who had taught me how to make a fishing boat. (I actually didn’t have any grandfather at all, but my dad had read me a story about how Indians made canoes by hollowing out a seasoned tree log with fire.) I had trouble making my Indian story credible until dear Miss Fahr rescued me with some kind of closure. I agonized several days of guilt after that, until she convinced me that making up stories was different from telling lies.

And as I think of it now, I realize the story I made up really might have been what I later learned from Joseph Campbell – about how myths can empower us. He said a myth is “a song of imagination inspired by the energies of the body.” I never did get over loving stories, whether they were true or only made up.

The more I think about ways Iowa’s natural environment inspired my young life, the more I realize how nature functions much like myths do, by giving meaning and purpose to the cultural and intellectual values that connect me to the world I inhabit, then as well as now.

After my new baby sister was born, my mom needed extra help, so by the time of second grade, we moved to Mason City to live with my grandmother. To get to my new school I had to walk several blocks along River Heights Drive, a street separated by dense woods from the limestone bluffs overlooking Willow Creek below.

I was the only new pupil in Garfield Elementary. My classmates teased me and definitely didn’t want me to walk home from school with them. So, I began walking home alone through the woods. I especially loved finding wild flowers to make a bouquet for my mom. By the time I was in third grade, my dad had a room built onto the back of my grandma’s house, where mom could live in a quiet, sunny place until she got well.

Those woods were my welcoming refuge. I created a path down to the Creek that ran under the wooden foot bridge spanning the water. Once down by the river, I could walk along its edge to a limestone cave I’d discovered. That shallow cave was a secret I never told anybody. I loved to watch the flowing water and daydream about ancient times when only wild animals lived here, or about early pioneers who built a mill downstream to grind up grain for making bread. Once I even found what looked like a bed in my cave that someone had built out of a pile of soft pine boughs. I pretended it had been made by a friendly Indian who was exploring the Creek in his dugout canoe.

More likely, the “bed” was an overnight resting place for one of the hoboes who sometimes rode in the box cars of the train that ran near my grandma’s house. (We called the train the “M and Saint L” for the Minneapolis and Saint Louis railroad.) Between the train tracks and my grandma’s house was an open field where a huge, gnarly old box elder tree grew. It was a great climbing tree and perfect for hiding.

On my tenth birthday, I got a bike of my own, so I could ride across the wooden foot bridge to the town’s beautiful new library built on the other side the Creek. Every Saturday afternoon, the Children’s Reading Room held a story hour where kids could sit on the semi-circle of window seats overlooking Creek and listen to a lady read stories. It was the most beautiful place I’d ever been. I even loved how it smelled, and I brought home new books to read up in my tree each week. I always felt safe there and nobody interrupted my stories. It was my most favorite reading place.

Several of the now-famous “Prairie School” homes and buildings were located near the Library in the Rock Glenn area across Willow Creek where my friend Doady lived. Doady’s mom was a beautiful opera singer, and her dad was a doctor who still had his old uniforms from the First World War.

Doady and I got to dress up in some of her dad’s old Army jackets to play WAR in the big grassy lot between my grandma’s house and the “M and Saint L” tracks. – and we could climb my big tree nearby to watch for pretend Nazi soldiers trying to blow up troop trains when they came through. I could always hide there if I was scared or lonely. Or I could pretend the tree was in a jungle where I was protected from “the Japs,” who had bombed Pearl Harbor and started the War. Sometimes my tree was a ship I steered from the captain’s lookout I built in the high fork of two big branches.

After I joined Girl Scouts, we pulled our coaster wagons through neighborhoods on weekends to help win the War by collecting cans of grease and pieces of foil and scrap metal to be recycled. In the summer I helped weed my Grandma’s “Victory garden” where we grew vegetables. After my mom started to feel better she and Grandma would seal boiling hot tomatoes and green beans and beets from the garden into glass jars, to save for eating later, when winter came. That way we could save our ration stamps for the things we couldn’t grow, like meat and butter.

Toward the end of World War Two, my dad had a house built for our family right in that big vacant lot next to my grandma’s house, and not far from my big box elder tree. I used leftover lumber scraps to build a shelf for my books and a sea captain’s helm for my fantasy sailing ventures. It was in that tree that I made my first attempts at writing stories just for fun.

And it was from that tree that I first spied the hoboes’ encampment a half- block away down the railroad tracks. I must have been in sixth grade when I first heard them one fall evening just before dusk. I could see the light of their campfire where they were cooking something and having great fun singing and laughing, even though they were poor homeless men. I knew about hoboes, because every time my grandma made doughnuts one would knock on her back door. My grandma called them “tramps,” but she gave them doughnuts anyway.

Grandma made cookies, too, and she even let me carry plates of them over to the railroad tracks when the troop train went through, so the soldiers could lean out the windows and take some. The soldiers were always hungry.

When I was in seventh grade, I had to ride my bike down Carolina Avenue across the railroad tracks to the Roosevelt Junior High School. I especially liked Miss Oliver’s Mythology class. We read about ancient gods and goddesses of the Greek people who lived even before Jesus. I knew about Jesus because I went to Sunday School at the Congregational Church where I had perfect attendance. But I liked mythology stories best, because they were a lot more interesting than Bible stories. By then my sister and I shared an upstairs bedroom in our new house, and I used to tell her some of those myths. Sometimes I even made up stories of my own.

So as a shy kid growing up in Iowa, I felt magically enfolded into the wooded neighborhood and natural heritage of my community, which strengthened my body and nourished my resourcefulness even as it stimulated my imagination and curiosity. In his book The Happiness Hypothesis, author Jonathan Haidt speaks of how the human mind is like a rider on an invisible elephant that empowers and drives one’s life. For me that elephant was the natural world – the fundamental base of life itself. It seemed like powerful magic to me and I never got bored by what the earth revealed.

I felt the same way about Iowa farms I visited with my dad when he became a John Deere dealer. Farmers in those days all practiced what we now call “sustainable farming.” I loved the sensory experience of new life budding out of those fields, from what seemed like an inexhaustible source.

Joseph Campbell said experiences like these are “Life stories,” what he called sustainable myths –natural cyclic powers that energize humans who themselves are participants in the same natural cycles. As a child I felt newly alive when new leaf buds appeared on seemingly dead branches after a long winter. I still do. AND as an ADULT I now know that forty percent of the world’s oxygen comes from our forests, which absorb deadly carbon dioxide and recycle it as life-giving oxygen. No wonder they made me feel alive.

But the problem, as we’re now realizing, is that dangerous imbalances in crucial cycles like these are increasing. Our whole world’s climate is being altered, largely by our increasing overuse and overpopulation of land without adequately sustaining soils and forests and rivers. And too many of us are transforming minerals extracted from the earth, like coal or oil, into fuel for heat and power. Forests replaced by concrete and cities cannot absorb the poisons which ensue and threaten the purity of air and water on which we all depend, to say nothing of climate stability.

I had the great opportunity this past fall to visit the Peruvian Amazon rainforest, a small part of worldwide forests like these that cover five percent of our planet, a total area about the size of our 48 United States. Here’s one of the things I learned: although these forests provide nearly half the world’s oxygen, more than 80 thousand acres of trees every day are now being destroyed by lumbering. I find that pretty shocking. And scary.

In a little more than a year I’ll be eighty years old. But as a somewhat fragile child growing up in Iowa, I was lucky enough to experience with some intimacy a part of the natural world whose life force and cyclic energies both comforted and empowered me. It was a gift of consciousness that made the natural world intuitively intelligible to my own childhood and still has a major influence on my intellectual and spiritual life. In the tenuous steps I made as a child, a student, a mother, and eventually a teacher and writer, I continue to be grateful for and strengthened by what I find beautiful and wise in nature, as well as in the human creative arts. I recognize the insignificant role I play in the vast and awesome universe I inhabit, but I’m inspired by how and what it continues to teach me. I only wish it were inspiring my grandchildren as much as their Ipods and Facebooks are.

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As a retiree, recently I’ve had the leisure to read some of the work of writers outside my discipline, including that of Janine Benyus, a biologist who shares this sense of nature’s wisdom, and has refined the ancient way of understanding and benefiting from the powers of nature into a new discipline she calls “BIOMIMICRY.” It is defined as

“The science and art of imitating Nature’s best biological ideas or nature’s wisdom, to solve human problems: like non-toxic adhesives inspired by geckos, energy efficient buildings modeled after termite mounds, and resistance free antibiotics invented by studying red seaweed. These are all examples of biomimicry happening today.”

Imitating nature’s ideas makes a whole lot of sense. Dr. Benyus has clarified Nature’s abundance of wisdom and processes from which we can learn: photosynthesis is one, along with natural selection, and self-sustaining ecosystems. Entrepreneurs are beginning to copy these natural designs as manufacturing processes to solve our own need to live in balance with the natural world. Innovation inspired by nature provides sustainable models for changing the way we grow food, make materials, harness energy, heal ourselves, store information and conduct business. We live on an intelligible Earth as well as a beautiful one.

But Dr. Benyus’ new science of biomimicry is doing more than just teaching us new ways to sustain our daily economies. It’s quite insistently clarifying our need to recalibrate the laws of humans to harmonize with the laws of nature to assure the future rights of human and all life in regard to what is obviously an evolving planetary climate change. This change can dramatically threaten the very Nature that fundamentally sustains us unless we undertake a significant paradigm shift to get our legal rules and guidelines re-aligned with environmental realities.

Nature’s laws are showing us that what is “good for us” can no longer be simply (or only) “profitable.” Instead, Nature provides imperative design guidelines such as: “How does it fit in?” “Will it last?” “Does it use only the energy it needs?” “Does it fit form to function?” and “Does it reward cooperation?” “Does it curb excess from within?” And perhaps most importantly, “Is it beautiful?”

By observing a healthy natural system, we learn that any properly scaled economy must allow a rich diversity of other creatures to thrive within it. But as Earth’s diversity is now eroding, it could soon smother the natural wellspring of good ideas, if not life itself. Some indisputable (and terrifying) facts warn us that: 95% of all virgin forest has been cut down in the last 200 years; 60% of all wetlands have been drained and filled; half of all native ecosystems are degraded to the point of endangerment. These are current facts. The human addiction to simply “growing the economy” is childishly and pitifully naïve given the inevitable consequences of imbalance and self-endangerment in what’s left of the natural world.

Predictions have it that under our present system, we will be doubling our population before we level off between 9 and 10 billion by mid-century. (presently: 6 billion 808 million) [U.S: almost 398 million]

Even so, if current rates of deforestation are maintained, only 10% of our forests will be left by 2050 (40 years from now). We depend on these existing natural patterns, but we’re only partially accommodating their complexity and diversity. Of crucial importance is that the only way to LEARN from nature is to both recognize and safeguard its naturalness – its complexity -- (both its and our own).

Unfortunately, here in Iowa, cash crop agriculture usually mimics industry, not nature. And the more we hybridize and shelter our annual crops, the more they depend on human care and lose their natural, inborn defense, which we mostly try to shore up with destructive pesticides and fertilizers, which in the end are inevitably DEnaturalizing .

This is why the prairie diversity of perennial agriculture being developed by Wes Jackson at his famous Land Institute in Kansas is so important. Perennial plants hold the soil against wind, and break the force of rain. They improve seed yield, re-establish growth without replanting, and increase yield. By contrast, a typical wheat field produces eight times more eroding run-off than Jackson’s prairie. And he has proved that diversity is also the cheapest form of pest control. Wes practices living off of nature’s wisdom: the best hedge against disaster is variety. It reduces competition for rain, increases yield, improves plant health, fights off disease naturally, contains invasions, and reduces erosion. Get this: Every component on Jackson’s land has multiple functions of shading, fertilizing and stabilizing, which all enhance its ability to adapt well to changes.

This is to suggest that learning from natural systems: “Biomimicry” can function as a new MYTHIC system to energize and sustain life, but also to give new meaning and purpose to the enterprise of modern agriculture. Dr. Benyus notes: “The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone.”

As I think back on it, I realize how my childhood in the woods and my tree helped sustain my rather fragile life as a child, and connected me with the powerful energy and regenerative intelligence of nature. In his book, The Living Universe, Duane Elgin says that “the entire universe is being continuously regenerated” and is “permeated and sustained by an unimaginably immense amount of flowing energy… [what he calls] the primary reality.” The energies of the universe and those of our bodies are the same. ALL of life depends fundamentally upon that energy, even though many of us are still out of synch with it, as dramatic changes in weather and climate continue to make their case. But our planet’s environmental realities dramatically reveal that only a recalibration of both values and laws can assure the natural regeneration of life on our planet. Climate change is real, even though not all our leaders take this as a serious priority.

Recalling my childhood has helped me understand it truly IS miraculous that we have a consciousness capable of perceiving the intelligibility of our world. And that we are “moved by what is beautiful.” NOW, more than anytime in my life, I believe it is crucially important for us to USE our miracle of consciousness to learn from the rich intelligibility of nature and help to sustain ITS life-enhancing wisdom. And beauty.

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Afterword: I live in a sort of forest of my own:

When my husband and I bought our house on Walnut Street in 1970, it had three big oaks on the property PLUS a huge old box elder tree like the one I grew up with/in. It was the oldest box elder tree in Iowa, may it rest in peace. Since then I have planted 13 more trees and several dozen high shrubs. (Alas, the box elder died naturally, probably aided by carpenter ants. But it served our children (AND ME) very well until then.)

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