Sherry Chandler

Civil disobedience

Join Wendell Berry and Bill McKibben in Civil Disobedience Against Coal-Fired Power Plants :

There are moments in a nation�s � and a planet�s � history when it may be necessary for some to break the law in order to bear witness to an evil, bring it to wider attention, and push for its correction. We think such a time has arrived, and we are writing to say that we hope some of you will join us in Washington D.C. on Monday March 2 in order to take part in a civil act of civil disobedience outside a coal-fired power plant near Capitol Hill.

Follow the link for details.

Via

Read als Blowing away King Coal at Salon.

I live in a state where coal is king and I realize that the issues are not completely simple. However, even if coal is to remain king, mountaintop removal is a stupid way to get at the coal:

After witnessing 470 mountains in central Appalachia get blown to bits by strip mining, the Coal River wind proponents were drawing a line in the sand. The verdict was in on mountaintop removal, which had been launched in 1970 as a quick and dirty option to cheaply procure coal. Thirty-eight years and a million and a half acres of destroyed hardwood forests later, mountaintop removal had run its course in the region with appalling effects. It had not only destroyed the natural heritage, it had ripped out the roots of the Appalachian culture and depopulated the historic mountain communities in the process.

Over 1,200 miles of waterways had been sullied and jammed with mining fill. Blasting and coal dust had made life unbearable for anyone in the strip-mined areas. Wells had been busted and polluted with toxic waste. Given the mechanization of aboveground mountaintop removal, and its shakedown of a diversified economy, coal mining jobs had plummeted as poverty rates rose in strip-mining areas.

In December, West Virginians saw what happened at a Tennessee power plant. A restraining wall burst and a billion gallons of coal ash poured out of a pond and deluged 400 acres of land in 6 feet of sludge. The proposed mountaintop removal site on Coal River Mountain rested beside a 6 billion-gallon toxic coal waste sludge dam above underground mines. If the proposed blasting took place, a fracture along the sludge lake could be catastrophic for the communities downstream.

The residents asked: Why should Coal River Mountain be the last mountain to die for a mistake?

Wendell Berry on Hayden Carruth

The voice of that time in my memory is that of the white-throated sparrow, who is mostly silent when he winters with us in Kentucky.

Read Wendell Berry’s On Hayden Carruth: A Friendship in Poetry

On politicians, leaders, and radicals

Contemplating this year’s three candidates for president, I see John McCain who promises four more years of governing just like George W. Bush. Such promises violate the rule of holes. Barack Obama seems to offer voters an empty slate on which they can write the transformational dream of their choice. He was careful to run before he had any substantial record that would prevent him from running such a campaign of inspiration and high ideals. Hillary Clinton offers a long history of substantial accomplishments and substantial losses, mistakes and self-reinventions. It is this very history that infuriates some voters.

What I don’t see, among the three candidates, is much in the way of innovation or leadership. Certainly I see no radical leaders, not even Jeremiah Wright. (He, I think, is flogging a book.) Why is that so in a year when the country is so eager to be taken in a new direction? Because the candidates are politicians, and politicians deal and compromise. They legislate and govern. They have to be elected, a process that tends to smooth away any radical edges. They hide behind “the will of the people.” They have tremendous egos necessary to believing they should be the elected one. But they rarely lead.

We need politicians. They can accomplish great things.

Even Abraham Lincoln was a consummate politician. So was FDR.

George W. Bush is not much of a politician and look where he got us.

But great leaders don’t come from the government, they rise from the people. I was reminded of that when Rosalie sent me this article on climate change by Michael Pollan, Why Bother?

For us to wait for legislation or technology to solve the problem of how we�re living our lives suggests we�re not really serious about changing � something our politicians cannot fail to notice. They will not move until we do. Indeed, to look to leaders and experts, to laws and money and grand schemes, to save us from our predicament represents precisely the sort of thinking � passive, delegated, dependent for solutions on specialists � that helped get us into this mess in the first place. It�s hard to believe that the same sort of thinking could now get us out of it.

Thirty years ago, Wendell Berry, the Kentucky farmer and writer, put forward a blunt analysis of precisely this mentality. He argued that the environmental crisis of the 1970s � an era innocent of climate change; what we would give to have back that environmental crisis! � was at its heart a crisis of character and would have to be addressed first at that level: at home, as it were. He was impatient with people who wrote checks to environmental organizations while thoughtlessly squandering fossil fuel in their everyday lives � the 1970s equivalent of people buying carbon offsets to atone for their Tahoes and Durangos. Nothing was likely to change until we healed the �split between what we think and what we do.� For Berry, the �why bother� question came down to a moral imperative: �Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.�

Wendell Berry is a man of truly radical ideas. He’s a libertarian and a hard-nosed moralist. But I think he’s right when he says it is we, the people, who have to do these things. Does that mean Dick Cheney was right when he sneered that ecology is a choice of personal morality? Yes, I think he was, though the sneer is his problem, not ours.

I don’t mean this post to be about climate change in particular but about change in general, taking the country in a better direction. Cheney is living proof of at least one of Jeremiah Wright’s preachings: governments fail. Politicians, even Barack Obama, do what politicians do. It’s up to the people to hold them accountable. Where is the outcry about torture? Where is the outcry against war crimes done in our names? Where is the outcry about our huge military expenditures? About our huge prison population? About mountaintop removal? About our staggering national debt? We all seem to want some one to change these things for us, but not if they have to raise our taxes. Not if it means we can’t have TiVo and iPod.

If George W. Bush had been a leader, he could have used the fall of our topless towers to strengthen our moral fiber. Instead, being a coward himself, he chose to play on our fears in order to keep his own power.

So it looks like we’re going to have to grow our courage from the grassroots if we want to survive. We are, after all, a democracy.

Or, as Anglachel put it:

It�s easy to denounce the entire corrupt US government, or to declare you are not a part of the great unwashed, but belong to an archipelago. It does not require courage. One needs nothing but an ego, a distorted view of your own self-importance, and an internet connection for that form of radicalism. It is not very radical, nor does it really make you part of Left politics.

True radicalism is the courage to say �No, I�m sitting here,� on a bus ride, not knowing if this might mean your death. And that courage is the heart and soul of Left politics.

Equality has always been the most radical thought in politics.

Pollan, by the way, doesn’t even ask you to do something this dangerous. Just give up meat or take a sabbath from consumption or plant a garden in your yard:

Going personally green is a bet, nothing more or less, though it�s one we probably all should make, even if the odds of it paying off aren�t great. Sometimes you have to act as if acting will make a difference, even when you can�t prove that it will. That, after all, was precisely what happened in Communist Czechoslovakia and Poland, when a handful of individuals like Vaclav Havel and Adam Michnik resolved that they would simply conduct their lives �as if� they lived in a free society. That improbable bet created a tiny space of liberty that, in time, expanded to take in, and then help take down, the whole of the Eastern bloc.

Rivers

from Allen Ginsberg’s “Sunflower Sutra,” Howl and Other Poems:

The oily water on the river mirrored the red sky, sun
      sank on top of final Frisco peaks, no fish in that
      stream, no hermit in those mounts, just our-
      selves rheumy-eyed and hungover like old bums
      on the riverbank, tired and wily.
Look at the Sunflower, he said, there was a dead gray
      shadow against the sky, big as a man, sitting
      dry on top of a pile of ancient sawdust–
–I rushed up enchanted–it was my first sunflower,
      memories of Blake–my visions–Harlem
and Hells of the Eastern rivers, bridges clanking Joes
      Greasy Sandwiches, dead baby carriages, black
      treadless tires forgotten and unretreaded, the
      poem of the riverbank, condoms & pots, steel
      knives, nothing stainless, only the dank muck
      and the razor-sharp artifacts passing into the
      past–
and the gray Sunflower poised against the sunset,
      crackly bleak and dusty with the smut and smog
      and smoke of olden locomotives in its eye–

from Wendell Berry’s “The Heron,” Farming: A Handbook

While the summer’s growth kept me
anxious in planted rows, I forgot the river
where it flowed, faithful to its way,
beneath the slope where my household
has taken its laborious stand.
I could not reach it even in dreams.
But one morning at the summer’s end
I remember it again, as though its being
lifts into mind in undeniable flood,
and I carry my boat down through the fog,
over the rocks, and set out.
I go easy and silent, and the warblers
appear among the leaves of the willows,
their flight like gold thread
quick in the live tapestry of the leaves.
And I go on until I see crouched
on a dead branch sticking out of the water
a heron—so still that I believe
he is a bit of drift hung dead above the water.

from Jim Wayne Miller’s “The Faith of Fishermen,” Brier, His Book:

We need to know wonders are still alive at the base
of the steel and concrete world we’ve made—a
yellow-eyed whiskered wildness, something old and
other, akin to what we feel, powerful, cold, living in
the dark around the gates that regulate the rivers
of our lives.

Joy Bale Boone Symposium

Friday, March 4 — University of Kentucky — A reading by Davis McCombs, Wendell Berry, and Barbara Kingsolver will be held in Memorial Hall on UK’s campus Friday at 7:30 p.m. The reading, which is free and open to the public, is part of a two-day symposium titled “Growing Kentucky.” The event is the latest in a series of symposiums that each year examine such subjects as food and arts, land use, food marketing, and environmental journalism. The symposium honors the life and work of Joy Bale Boone, Kentucky’s poet laureate from 1997-99, who knew well the state’s rural culture.

Roofing

As a passive participant in the world’s longest do-it-yourself roofing project, I was amused, in my recent reading, to come across two poems that made me wonder whether the male perspective might be a little different.

From Wendell Berry’s Farming: A Handbook (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1970)

…we bent five days
in the sun, tearing free the old roof, nailing on
the new, letting the sun touch for once
in fifty years the dusky rafters,and then
securing the house again in its shelter and shade.
Thus like a little ledge a piece of my history
has come between me and the sky.
      “The New Roof”

From David Rogers’s The Secret Knowledge of Water (Wavelength/Albireo Press, 2003)

… I stand listening in the attic,
a now useless coffee can

in my hand, and feel just
a little sad and lost.
No leaks, but I am cut off
from some process

that has always taken things
where they need
to be. ..
        “New roof, first rain”

Now, it’s true that two instances do not make a data set but it is equally true that I’ve never seen anything lyrical about a leaky roof. Mostly I view a sound roof as an instrument for the joyful music of rain. The drip of a leak is a discord.

On the other hand, this difference may be one of age. I would estimate that both Wendell Berry and David Rogers were thirty-something when they wrote these poems. As I develop arthritic creaks and pops in my own framework whenever a storm front comes through (especially a cold front), I tend to consider a solid roof and a reliable furnace as valuable as my 403b.

OR – it’s possible that I need to take a little walk around the circle and view this whole roofing thing from another perspective. Two excellent poems here. I recommend that you find them and read them in their entirety.

The way of education…

The way of education leads away from home. That is what we learned from our children’s education.

The big idea of education, from first to last, is the idea of a better place. Not a better place where you are, because you want it to be better and have been to school and learned to make it better, but a better place somewhere else. In order tomove up, you have got to move on.
      from Wendell Berry’s Hannah Coulter

Not fair to hold an author responsible for the musings of his characters, especially Hannah Coulter who is grieving for her lost children. And yet this attitude turns up other places in Wendell Berry’s writings. Jayber Crow, for example, rejects upward mobility, the city, and the university in such a panic that he braves the 1937 flood in order to get back to Port William. Once there, he becomes a sort of barber priest for the “membership’s” white male farmers. Eventually he lives a Harlan Hubbard existence in a primitive cabin on the Kentucky River, with barbering as his art instead of landscape painting. The happiest people in Hannah Coulter are the Branches, who view schooling as an inconvenience and education as learning how to cobble together farm equipment, to makedo, and subsist. The most miserable is Hannah’s son, who makes a fortune in Silicon Valley but loses his soul.

I have trouble differentiating this anti-modernism from that of people who take their kids out of public school so they don’t have to learn about evolution. Or sex. I spend a lot of time arguing when I read Wendell Berry, and I usually fight myself to a draw.

Meanwhile, Chris Offutt has remarked (and I paraphrase because I can’t remember where I saw the quote, maybe in Ace magazine) that I-64 was supposed to bring the world to the mountains, but in fact, has emptied the mountaineers out into the world. I think most of them are living in housing projects in Scott County and working for Toyota. A better place?