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Paris to Provence, 2006
Thinking Globally and Writing Locally
Towards a Political Ecology of the Personal Essay
by Larry L. Dill
Nothing is more important than the land. Nothing.
--Wendell Berry
The great dilemma of environmental reasoning stems from the conflict between short term and long term values.
--E.O. Wilson
I'm standing on the gallows with my head in the noose. Any minute now I'm expecting all hell to break loose.
--Bob Dylan
Our Story
I awoke this morning mildly depressed as usual. I should have been happier. Being awake had freed me from a dream I had been dreaming for what seemed like a very long time. I was in a prison. I had been given a death sentence and was to be hanged. And then I had been given a reprieve and was to be released. But my release had been held up for lack of the proper paperwork. I had to wait for the certificate of my release to come from somewhere out side the prison walls. My cell had already been given to someone else. I had to wait in a hallway beside the desk of a young man who though professional enough in his demeanor seemed indifferent to the terror that ranged through my body. The anxiety, fear and sadness. It was not the young man’s job to care for my emotions. The reprieve had been spoken but it was not on paper. He had no authority to release me without the proper paperwork. He went about his duties with bureaucratic efficiency sometimes leaving his desk and disappearing into the maze of corridors in the prison and then returning with barely a sidelong glance at me. Sometimes I would ask timidly if there was any news. He would shake his head and mumble, “Not yet.”, and look at his watch and shuffle his papers and go back down the hall. It was one of those horrible dreams one ought to be delighted to awaken from but are so real that they follow you around for days like a bad memory.
I have come here to Waynesville, and to Haywood County, North Carolina to live and write. You can see that my demons have come with me. Why I have come here rather than somewhere else is a long story with an unfinished and unsettling ending like the dream I’ve been describing. I thought perhaps I should try to remain anonymous here. Anonymous as a writer. Try to publish my writing somewhere else where no one will ever see me buying beer in the grocery store or walking my dog in the park. I would be free to move about town without being recognized as a writer and I would for the most part feel more comfortable about confessing my sins and professing my opinions on all manner of subjects without angering my neighbors and embarrassing myself and my friends.
The first (and last) time I tried to write locally was 25 years ago in Nacogdoches, Texas. I had a column in the local newspaper that chronicled the often hilarious attempts of my wife and me and our young family to “go back to the land,” building our own house, raising a menagerie of farm animals and struggling to find enough hours in the day to read and write about the issues of the larger world.
The phrase, “Think globally, act locally,” was more than a bumper sticker to us back then. It was a mantra. The phrase, then as now, was associated with the rise of environmental consciousness with all its implications about saving the planet from over consumption by an exploding human population. It was a natural intellectual progression, like feminism, that grew out of the anti-war and civil rights movements of the 60’s and 70’s. Thinking globally involved a recognition that the planet earth had finite resources and those of us in high consumption regions like Europe and North America (and this was the “acting locally” part) must learn to live on less. Less fossil fuel. Fewer consumer goods like automobiles and air conditioners. Less water consumption, more recycling, etc., etc. The idea is sometimes attributed to anthropologist Rene Dubois who suggested it as an antidote to the so called “green revolution” in which multinational corporations exploited the third world for enormous profits disguised as missionary zeal.
As a writer I’ve always had a divided mind, at once deeply personal and confessional, but at the same time expressing highly moralistic concerns about environmental ethics and social justice. I’ve tried to emulate Thoreau, Whitman, Aldo Leopold, Wendell Berry and Edward Abbey all at the same time. I’ve wanted to season my writing with the mysticism of Emily Dickenson and Ivan Illich, the humor of Mark Twain, Phillip Roth, and Charles Bukowski, and the intellectual rigor and righteousness of Noam Chomsky and E. O. Wilson. My friend and toughest critic, Robert Salmon, a research librarian living in New Jersey, says my writing is often just too “self-conscious.” He’s probably right.
But the idea of thinking globally and acting locally has manifested itself in my life in a different form: “Think Globally and Write Locally” is my mantra now. “Locally” has two meanings here: one is the physical place I’m living. The other is the mental place. As important as it is to write about the degradation of the rainforests in the Amazon or the air pollution in China or Tennessee, right here in Haywood County, North Carolina, an environmental battle is raging.
As for my personal battles, you may not care. But it seems to me that what Wilson calls the “bottleneck” of history into which human population growth, over consumption and environmental degradation has cast us, can only be solved by a balance of scientific education and personal self-examination. It is all well and good to develop an environmental ethic and a political point of view. But how we get there depends on who we are and how we feel. One way to begin to make peace with your antagonists is to try to put yourself in their shoes. Another way of doing it, it seems to me, is a constant and rigorous self-examination.
Albert Camus defined an intellectual as a person who watches himself think. For me, writing is a way of thinking. It is easier for me to change my mind on paper than it is inside the now well documented prison in my brain. Understanding the imagery of my emotional reactions to the politics around me is as important to me as my understanding of economics and biodiversity.
As I return here to Haywood County, two important and interrelated environmental concerns are being discussed in public and private forums. One is the impact of population growth and housing development on the local forests. If Becky Johnson’s series in the Smoky Mountain News, “Development Devours the Forests” (April 21 and April 28, 2004) is any indication, the public debate (and the series itself, well written as it is, but nevertheless merely laying out as it does the economic battle lines between loggers and developers) largely misses the most important ecological issue: that both logging and development are bad for these forests.
John Gardner, the founder of Common Cause, once wrote that challenging the way another man earns his living is a dangerous act. But whatever the benefits of large scale logging and cattle grazing in these Appalachian Mountains on public and private lands, the loss of animal habitat, rare plant species and water quality can no longer be ignored.
It is understandable that private property owners would bristle at being told by me or anybody else what they could not or should not do with their land. But in Waynesville, the bogus environmental ethic called “wise use” may be on the verge of infecting the stewards of our public lands as well. According to Jeff Schmerker writing in the Waynesville Enterprise Mountaineer (April 28, 2004) a proposal now before the Board of Aldermen to “selectively log” 5% a year of the towns pristine 7,000 acre watershed on Allen’s Creek is a viable prospect. Here is a crystal clear example of short term economic thinking with long term environmental consequences. Yet it is being suggested, cavalierly, by some of the players Schmerker interviews, that a 20 year plan to log most of the entire 7,000 acres would be a “model of sustainable forestry.” Go figure! Presumably after running through the entire forest in 20 years they could start over. Not only does this not take into consideration the degradation of other things animal and vegetable that are living in the forests besides the trees, any old denizen of these mountains can tell you that hardwood forests can regenerate but they cannot mature again in 20 years.
The environmental challenges arising from growing tourism, second home ownership and continued large scale logging, are formidable, but they are not insurmountable. Before initiating anything as foolish as “wise use” practices (sometimes even more euphemistically called “best practices,” by the U.S. Forest Service) Waynesville’s aldermen should hold public hearings, not so much for citizens to vent, though that should be allowed as well, but to design economic models for generating revenues that do not require degradation of the city’s (and the planet’s) irreplaceable natural resources. These Appalachian Mountains are a treasure trove of plants with enormous potential for science and medicine. There is already evidence that indigenous peoples in the Amazon and Central America are reaping more profits from low impact sustainable extraction of native plants than is made on similar sized parcels of land nearby that have been given over to logging and ranching operations. We even have the remnants of our own indigenous people here. The Cherokees and their ancient predecessors have been in these mountains for a thousand years with virtually no negative impact whatsoever until the Europeans came. A lot can be learned from the way they lived and what “wise use” used to mean to them.
But even without the help of the Indians the ecosystem service value of these forests when they are simply left completely wild is, in and of itself, of significant economic value to the region. According to Appalachian Voices, a conservation group based here in Western North Carolina,
Ecosystem services are those things provided
by nature that man would otherwise need to
provide for himself. They include air and
water filtration, climate regulation,
maintenance of biodiversity and scenic beauty.
Using natural water filtration as just one example, Appalachian Voices cites studies that estimate the wild land water in Western North Carolina to be worth $3.7 billion annually. And they cite a 1998 study that estimates
The value of ecosystem services for temperate
forests like North Carolina’s at $122 per acre
per year. Less than one tenth of this is due to
raw material production (agriculture and
forestry) and about one third is from all direct
use values, including recreation. Thus, North
Carolina’s forests can be said to be providing
in excess of $80 per acre per year even if no
one ever sets foot in them.
One last thought before we close: Ironically, like the term "writing locally," "thinking globally" turns out to have multiple meanings. In the age of brain science it has been discovered tthat women think with a larger part of their brains than men do. It is called "global thinking." Not in the political sense, per se, but in the sense of taking everything into account. There is more than a metaphor and a feminist manifesto here. The ways in which women think may actually be better for the environment than the ways in which men think. "Well, Duh!" the girls cry out. But in the end, planet saving environmental solutions may have to come from women, or at the very least, men doing their best to think like women. Women are more likely than men to respect other cultures. More likely to cooperate and more likely to seek non violent solutions. Why would they not be more likely than men to save the earth?
As I write this, I’m sitting on the porch of a log cabin (I have to confess I built here by hand 5 years ago with logs I cut right out here in front of me) in the East Fork Gap above the Pigeon River (so named for the now extinct Passenger Pigeons who once lived here). I’m watching a Scarlet Tanager and his two young wives setting up their summer home here in Haywood County, Appalachia. They have just arrived from their winter home in the Amazon. Trying to think globally while writing locally, I’m reminded that these forest habitats, Appalachia and Amazonia, were once part of the same land mass. They split apart millions of years ago to form these very mountains, perhaps the oldest mountains on earth. But we’re still connected (at least for a while) by these brilliant Scarlet Tanagers, and by indigenous Amazonians sending us modern medicines and deep ecology.
In my prison dream the reprieve of my death sentence was left unresolved. Let’s hope our planet, and these local mountains, have better luck than I did. Southern Appalachia is one of the most beautiful and most biologically diverse regions on the face of the earth. The first, second and third generation immigrants I’ve met here are earnest, hardworking and sincere (Scots, Jews, Irish, Blacks and Latinos). There is an abundance of cultural heritage, intellectual talent and artistic vision. And there are people living in these mountains whose ancestors lived here before recorded history. The combination of all these local qualities can and should become a true global model of economic security and personal environmental responsibility.
For more information on issues and ideas discussed in this essay see the following:
On Global Ecology:
The Future of Life by Edward O. Wilson, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2002
On Local Ecology:
Appalachian Voices at www.appvoices.org
On Environmental Writing:
"A letter to Wendell Berry" in Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs (Living and Writing in the West) by Wallace Stegner, Penguin Books, New York, 1992.
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