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My Woodland Conversation With Mother Nature


MC (Mike Cohen): 1 sometimes get the feeling that you overreact to Americans.

MN (Mother Nature): You’re not the one being discriminated against, that’s why. Let me lell you, I try to remain calm about your actions, and to attempt to recover from the wounds you inflict on me, but sometimes I can’t maintain-my composure. Some things are beyond bearing. I am nothing but outraged by the insanity of war. War! That is where your bewildered civilization has taken you. The worst of it is that you don’t have the foggiest notion why you rain death on each other and on me, or where you learned to act so insanely. I’d like to tell you where you learned war. You learned it from your prejudicial, sick relationship with me. It’s obvious that what many Americans call civilization is actually an act of war against me. It gets me furious.

MC: What an awful thing to say about Americans! We want peace.

MN: In the name of civilization, you bomb me with insecticides and herbicides, you plunder my forests and habitats, you invade my life systems: you annihilate species, your tanks bulldoze my landscapes, you capture my wildlife and “civilize” them; you take prisoners of war and torture them in vivisection experiments, you murder innocent creatures, you ravage wilderness or place it in fences; you tune out your personal feelings of self-preservation, because on some level you’re aware that they are Voice of Nature broadcasts: you use nuclear weapons, nerve gas, and poisons on me; your fleets attack my fish and marine mammals. All this you do in ever increasing intensities to achieve prosperity. All this you encourage and force your children to learn and emulate. All this you do for money and status—distance from me. Your educational system is your basic training; your lives are as warriors, and I am both the battleground and the enemy. Megalopolis is a beachhead for your assault on the continent; your G.N.P. and your department stores are your ammunition dumps; your shopping malls are my tombstones; a white coat your uniform.

MN: But we’re trying to stop war, stop the arms race...

MN: Nonsense, you will never stop making war, until you learn to make peace. You will never learn peace with people, until you learn peace with life, for people are life. You can learn peace with life only by living peacefully with me, by teaching it experientially, by gradually living and learning it in every way. Only when you start to learn peace with me, will you learn harmony with life. Only when you learn to detest your evil myths about me, will you see me favorably. Only when you treat me as an equal, will you learn equality, freedom, and brotherhood, for they are me. I know all this to be true, because I am Nature, I am life, I am you. I am the personification of people. As you kill or help me, so do you kill or help yourselves. I am of God and...

I became aware of a voice calling my name, and realized with a start that I had been hearing it for some minutes. I looked up, and there was one of the Expedition students, looking exasperated.
“Mike,” she said, “Mike! We said we’d be together, ready to go, at nine. It’s ten after! I’ve been calling you and calling you. What were you thinking about!?”
I realized that I had been thinking about Nature’s accusations and a sign I had read on a nature trail:
Is it by your wisdom that the hawk soars and spreads his wings to¬ward the South?
Is it your command that the eagle mounts up and makes his nest on high. Job 39:26-27.
I Stood up and slung my sleeping bag over my shoulder. “Sorry; I lost track of time...”

As I walked toward the bus, I thought to myself, “Lord, I’m practically living in two worlds; I hear Nature, but I know full well that Nature is not speaking to me with words. I’ve become aware of the subjects in my conversation with Nature experientially, by living in the environment. Can others learn of Nature’s viewpoint by words alone? Isn’t the process, the joys of contact with real people and places necessary—in order to balance the impact of our cultural excesses, in order to think globally?”

Nature’s allegations that Americans are at war with her did not rest easy with me. They nagged at my feelings until we visited Florida, where the expedition observed one of the battles firsthand.

Travelling north out of the Everglades, we met and worked with Spanish-speaking migrant farm workers of Haitian, Puerto Rican, and Mexican descent. They were in the fields gathering America’s crops, while airplanes flew overhead spewing insecticides whose stench was pervasive. We learned that before the fruits and vegetables were ripe, they were sprayed up to a dozen times by insecticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers. Then the farm laborers gathered them.

In order to acquaint ourselves with the migrants’ circumstances, we worked with them in the fields, visited them in their company-owned labor camp shacks, and spoke with personnel in agencies that were concerned with their plight.

Many of the workers with whom we visited appeared to be unhealthy. They claimed that they felt ill due to continuous contact with pesticides and herbicides; that the chemicals took their toll due to mishandling, misleading research, and more concern for profits than for the workers’ welfare. But even if insecticides were safe for healthy humans, workers who had cuts or abrasions from the citrus thorns (and many often did) could have the chemicals enter their bodies. Bleeding noses, aching, nausea, dizzyness, cataracts, and “the flu” seemed to be normal.

Some farmlands even sounded like battlefields. As compressed air cannons blasted shotgun reports to frighten away birds, we entered the fields and picked strawberries, celery, and oranges. We were part of work crews that typically included pregnant women and families with young children. At times, tractors less than 150 yards away from us would spray pesticides whose labels read;


It reminded me of a farmer who was carrying a load of pesticide past an insane asylum when an inmate called out, “Watcha gonna do with the poison?”
Replied the farmer, “Put it on my strawberries.”
“Hell,” said the inmate, “I put cream on mine, and they tell me I’m crazy.”

Of course, without the “facts,” one couldn’t prove that the questionable chemicals we observed being sprayed carelessly were the cause of the workers’ ills. To gather evidence for that, the laborers were used as human experimental animals, but to no avail, because research on them was clouded by the effects of their use of alcohol, cigarettes, and drugs. It is as if their use of these substances were not in part caused by the tensions rising from the work environment. To state their grave situation in ignorantly bigoted terms: they are not yet “out of the weeds.”

We noted that many migrants’ red-cubic skills are unable to cope with normal American attitudes. Although adequate in their native lands, their language and upbringing is overwhelmed by the profit motivated schemes and intents of American agribusiness. In the eyes of mainstream America, the field workers appear to be different, closer to Nature—closer to dirt, sweat, and disease. Prejudicially, they are treated accordingly.

Like the wild ecosystems that have been bulldozed into farm acreages, industrial sites, and retirement developments, some migrants are little more than cannon fodder for agribusiness. As is much of the planet, many migrants are victims of our overzealous personal and collective distance- from-Nature compulsions.

We discovered that some of these field workers are being exploited in the same manner as were children, farm girls, immigrants, and the land during the industrial revolution over a century ago. For example;
•    Migrants are lured to Florida by rumors and industry’s announcements of the availability of vital work and money that the laborer’s need for
survival, not for status.
•    While intoxicated, migrants have been abducted from saloons to the farmlands.
•    They are paid minimum wages or below because they are a surplus, helpless, human commodity. Like the spraying machines, they, too, are cultural objects.
•    Their wages are eroded by payment of rent and services to company-owned housing and stores.
•    Workers believe that they can not leave their jobs because they owe money to the company.
•    Judicial cases of peonage (slavery) are being tried and won against management.
•    Against child labor laws, children are illegally being used to work in the fields.
•    To quit working means starvation or deportation.
•    With the exception of one unionized agricultural company, laborers are unable to control their working conditions, long hours, or exposure to harmful pesticides.
•    The cancer rate among field workers is higher than the national norm.
•    The loss of topsoil is as much as eight inches per year in some areas.
•    Thousands of birds have been killed by a single spraying of the fields.

In agribusiness, the history of industrialization seems to be repeating itself America’s educational system might be healthier if we taught History as it is enacted today. In that way, at least we might have a chance to improve our history as we learn it.

As Expedition members shared with each other our views and experiences in the fields, we concluded that the workers’ plight seemed identical to that of expendable wildlife populations that were and are subject to our “plume hunter mentality.” That mentality annihilated South Florida wading bird populations at the turn of the century in order to decorate women’s hats with the birds’ plumes. We noted that like the migrant workers, wading bird populations and wildlife have few skills to ward off our acts of prejudice against that which is natural.

Like the wardens who protected the wading bird populations during historic plume hunting times, the agents and agencies that are today attempting to help the workers are being harrassed. Their attempts to increase the migrants’ self-esteem, self-preservation consciousness, and self-help capabilities are condemned by many to be communist, left-wing, labor agitators. Some of the agents have mysteriously disappeared. That is little different from the plight of two Audubon Society waterfowl wardens
in 1902; they were murdered in the performance of their wildlife protection duties. It was encouraging to learn from the migrants that they appreciated Audubon’s present efforts to fight the use of harmful pesticides.

The whole experience helped bring me to the truth of Mother Nature’s assertion that we have been, and still are, at war with her. 1 found it easier to agree with her allegation, as I witnessed unprotected field workers become immediate battle casualties as were the buffalo and Indians during the last century. Chemicals, pesticides, and their residues are found everywhere in the food chain; if we are to avoid the field laborers’ plight, we must make peace with nature on our dinner plates, in our backyards, and in our legislatures.

After our visit, I was not wild about working in the fields of agribusiness. As I write these words. I’m struck by my use of the word “wild.” It is a symbol that unprejudicially describes the jubilant alive feelings of Nature. The Whole Life factor can help us attain congruency with the planet by helping us become wild about Nature.

Invoking the Whole Life factor in Florida discloses that a very low percentage of product-planet congruency is to be found in killing multitudes of birds for a few plumes that are placed on women’s hats, designing alligator hide fashions that endanger alligators, or selling sprayed fruits and vegetables that are served during the winter in Chicago.

In comparison to the low Whole Life rating of Florida’s agricultural produce, a cup of kale has a very high Whole Life factor. That is because kale is a hardy backyard vegetable that can grow in the northern U.S.A. throughout the winter. It has more vitamin A and C than does an orange.

In the final analysis, we must begin to understand that it is our -prejudicial compulsion for extraneous, euphoric distance from Mother Nature that fuels our war with her. Unless we bridge that distance by paying attention to the Whole Life factors of products, processes, places, and persons, we may remain self-defeating soldiers in the questionable army of our culture.
 

Chapter Twelve

I am more than ever convinced that we Americans are looking in the wrong places for solutions to many of our environmental and social problems. In our search for solutions, we have become dependent upon the light from technology, science, and academia—and still we have no working answers. We are still in the dark. Our best course would be to bring our dependency upon these things to light in the middle of the block, where our present relationship with Nature also needs illumination.

When Susan Gould and other professional people confessed they were perplexed by my conception of a relationship between humanity and Nature, 1 was forcibly reminded that my life experiences differed from those of mainstream America.

I had spent fifteen years living with Nature, camping out year-round; those years brought me to my present understanding. It was my intense, lengthy contact with Nature’s fluctuations and with people’s various adap¬tations to them that led me to conclude that our relationship with Nature is prejudiced against Nature.

1 learned about Nature and life relationships in the same way 1 had learned, as a child, how to swim: I was immersed in my environment and my survival hinged on my ability to cope successfully with it. Just as the chance of drowning made learning to swim a high priority in the water, living outdoors in a small community made learning to deal with people, and with the sun, rain, snow, and wind, a highly motivated pursuit.

Very gradually, 1 became aware how powerfully I was influenced by the people and places around me. I began to understand that my feelings and my behavior were much a reflection of my immediate and past environments.

I was confronted with the realization that I was not the captain of my fate, soul, or environment, as my formal education had insinuated. I was subject to the natural and unnatural influences of my surroundings. With this discovery, I began to see that Nature, relationships, and my feelings of self-preservation—my feelings about life and wanting to stay alive—had been almost entirely ignored during my formal education. They appeared to have been equally overlooked in the upbringing of most other folks I knew.
But for myself, things began to change as I lived outdoors.

1 began to actualize that I existed in the planet Earth, that my feelings existed, were a part of me, and were therefore as important, if not more important, to my survival as the teachings of science, academia, and religion.

Within a caring, supportive, non-competitive, small group, I began to take the risks associated with expressing my feelings. As I learned to voice my feelings and deal with my emotions in this outdoor setting, I became aware just how much traditional education and therapy, by taking place within the confines of four walls, teach the student/ patient to adapt him or herself to a four-wall environment. I could see it in myself. My conditioning taught me, in seeking answers to problems, to find solutions that were culturally acceptable.

1 once swam in chlorinated swimming pools because in subtle ways I had been taught that the lakes, rivers, and oceans were infested with undercurrents, snapping turtles, leeches, sharks, and sea urchins, all of which could be harmful to me. I wonder now whether 1 was taught to ignore the joys of natural swimming areas out of genuine concern for my welfare or because there was no money to be reaped by my instructors from their use. In any case, swimming pools were the cultural solution and a reality of my life.

How different are the natural realities of life from those which we are taught inside academic walls. On the Expedition, Nature and the realities of the whole environment of America are the teacher, the classroom, and the curriculum. Nature activates our curiosity and prompts us to ask questions of ourselves, each other, academia, and all the people and places we encounter from Maine to California, and in our backyard.

Life in North America is the subject of the Expedition, but secretly, without our conscious attention. Nature has given me and others her favorite course; life on Earth with her. For years I never realized that I had enrolled in her course or was taking it. To the contrary, my role was to teach ecology, and the natural and social sciences, to my students. I was an instructor and guide, not a student myself.

Slowly, through trial and error (for there was no syllabus or study guide). Nature made me conscious of a set of feelings and values that I had been carrying with me throughout my forty-five year lifetime, but for which I had never made room. These feelings were basic emotions about being alive that had been seduced, sublimated, educated, manipulated, colored, masked, and suppressed by the rewards and rejections of my indoor childhood. Even as I began to recognize my natural self-preservation feelings, they appeared, through my culture-colored eyes, to be simple, and easily taken for granted and ignored. I now call them my Planet Blue feelings.

Natural feelings are the essence of life—the tension and tension- release of hunger, thirst, companionship, respiration, excretion, pain, and sexual stimulation—and yet most of them are considered uncivilized in their natural form. They are suppressed in our culture rather than celebrated. The noise of civilization drowns them out and makes them seem unimportant or integrates them and attaches them to parts of our culture.

I was too busy trying to cope with day-to-day life in my cultural environment to spare a thought for the whisper of my self-preservation feelings, just as swimmers faced with the choice of swimming or drowning are too engrossed with the challenge of staying afloat to pause to ask themselves how they experience the sensation of water.

Through my years on the Expedition, my encounters with Nature began to strengthen and reinforce these natural self-preservation feelings, for they were of Nature and she smiled on them. Finally, today they equal in emotional importance and in impact on my consciousness the cultural manifestations that were superimposed upon them since the day of my birth. The process occurred through the cumulative, random experiences of nine years of living outdoors in the Expedition community. Only then did 1 reach an equilibrium between my cultural and natural feelings; undirected except by Nature’s patient hand, it took nearly a decade of adult life in the natural environment to offset the conditioning of my previous thirty-nine years.

But once equilibrium with Nature was established, I found I had gained a new plateau of consciousness. I was, for the first time, able to experience Nature and culture equally—on both an emotional and an intellectual level. Long forgotten feelings and needs (my unthinking but unswerving childhood commitment to staying alive and staying happy) began to make sense and become strong, vigorous messages about survival and health. I was no longer subject to easy manipulation by the surreptitious messages of civilization. 1 could at times actually transcend the internal and external voices of the media, the church, the educational system, and other self-serving institutional authorities. Rather than be emotionally subject to their dictates, I found that 1 could equalize their influence by listening to the voice of Nature as she spoke to me externally through her dying ecosystems and internally through my natural feelings of self-preservation.

The apostle Paul said, But I was freehorn. In her own way, Nature has taught me to be the free person that I was born to be. She has shown me the injustice, the stupid futility of my culturally-induced prejudice against her.

My Expedition experiences began to speak to my emotions through three avenues of consciousness: my cultural perceptions, my experience of the natural environment, and my newly-understood, culture-free natural feelings of self-preservation. I began to feel unity of the three, a distinct sense of wholeness, self-worth, and independence.

In recent years, 1 have made it a practice to think about difficult social problems while 1 am in a natural setting. Nature helps me to find in myself natural feelings that apply to many social conflicts: feelings that I just don’t seem able to experience when I’m surrounded by four walls.

During the year following the rejection of my article, I took the problem of people’s relationship with Nature on the Expedition, and asked, “How can we, as people, subdue our prejudice against Nature?” I directed the question to the whole experience—not just to myself, to the group, or to the environment. It was asked of the year and of the planet. 1 believe that the answers to which I was led, over the course of that year, can help to bridge the gap between people and Nature, because they deal with the biological essence of our prejudice against Nature. They integrate natural feelings into our cultural processes.



Prejudice Against Nature (1982 A.D.)

Prologue

BUT ONE BREATH HAVE ALL
6; 15 AM. The universe pulls the bay waters up to the seaweed line that marks yesterday’s high tide. I, seeking the sources of our prejudice against Nature, push the canoe north’ard and let it gently glide with the new outgoing tide. This is the last such ride. Why did they build a tidal hydroelectric dam? Where will the water be at 8:30,1 wonder? Why will the sea never come back?

I am carried like a corpuscle in a giant artery from the heart of the Earth. The futile salty tears on my cheeks are a fitting eulogy for the saline plasma of seawater that now retreats ten feet per minute from the shore. Who recognizes the bay waters as lifeblood: a reverent mixture of food, air, and minerals, stirred to perfection by wind, waves, and the timeless flushing of the one-mile tide four times each day? Who cares if the seaweed deposited at the highest tide this month would have decomposed into a unique nourishing fertilizer to be carried to the waiting offshore waters at the highest tide next month?

I am engulfed by fish, shellfish, micro-organisms, marsh grass, and seaweeds. Representatives of every pulsing, wriggling, flowering life form have gathered here to suckle the lifestream of the bay. They are sustained by it, as am I. It is no wonder that so many of us choose this place to live, for here we don’t buy energy or food. Nature freely shares it with us at this and every other moment. All that is asked is that we return it when we need it no longer.

6:57 AM. The sun breaks through the easterly fog over the shoreline towns and cities. I only wish I could, too. Why do we deny and discourage life? Why did they build the dam? What is so hateful about this place that we are driven to kill it? I am looking into cold clear water. I dip my hand into a pleasant forest of rockweed, snails, and periwinkles—friends and food. The wind whispers; a gull floats by; a seal follows my canoe with curiosity—submerges, and appears again—perhaps to confirm that it is seeing correctly, for the boat does not have a motor. A loon calls, as small waves and dancing sunlight glance from my paddle. What is so boring about here and now? How is it harmful? I float. I am being drawn out to sea
by the powers that created me, while others are drawn to destroying these powers, to enslaving them with a tidal dam to run their television sets, instead of letting them be to run the planet.

7:35 AM. The far-flung ring of grassland, mudflats, and seaweed-painted boulders grows larger as the receding sea gives its intertidal sustenance to fish, mammals, and fishermen offshore. I watch the demise of multibillions of shoreline life forms. They are drowning by being submerged in air, just as I would drown, if I were submerged in water. They will wait expectantly for their bloodstream to return as it has for millenia past. They don’t share my secret; they don’t know that the sea has made its last visit. That lesson will be learned the hard way; as the slow, deliberate stress of suffocation and thirst begin to be felt; as desert dryness and summer heat leisurely broil the flats and their inhabitants.

Have I gone mad? Am I the only one who recognizes that human consciousness is shared, at some level, by this community from which we gained all of our life processes? Am I deceived in believing that the turmoiled intertidal community is conscious, that it knows that seawater is but inches away and that it will not return on its appointed rounds? How convenient for us to conceive mud, water, and stones to be dead; to decide that other life has no consciousness, pain, or equality. What an incredible alibi we have created to soothe our guilt of killing for a profit, of brainwashing our neighbors into believing that they are nothing unless they brush their teeth electrically. Isn’t it the economics of a madman to trade away a life system for an electric can opener? I murmur sadly to the bay, “We hate you.”

8:45 AM. The tide has retreated from the highest point it will ever again reach in this finger of Cobscook Bay. Hundreds of acres lie exposed to an environment as hostile as that of the moon. The inconceivable trade-off begins as the minutes tick by. Where are the friends of the Earth; where are those Americans who say they care? Are they watching television and dreaming of further riches to be gleaned from the unnecessary tidal power, while a part of the bay dies along with a part of themselves?

As if disgusted by the nightmare it leaves behind, the tide retreats below its new highwater mark. But as the Maine State Legislature has proven, this is no dream. A Tidal Power Authority has been authorized. One wonders when we will outgrow our childhood. One wonders if our immorality to each other begins at the interface with Nature’s far-reaching shoreline. One wonders if the tide somehow says goodbye to its ancient home.

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