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The Blandair Review
Volume 1, Number 1
Perspectives
"The Forest for the Trees": A Loss
of Perspective
There is an old expression we use when
we're too close to a problem to see the larger dimensions of that problem.
"We can't see the forest for the trees." In such situations we are
lost in a forest of our own making. We may have debts, for instance, that
have accumulated beyond our ability to pay. Credit cards spent to their
limits. Monthly car payments the size of a modest mortgage. And mortgage
payments the size of a small country's national budget.
I exaggerate a bit here, but the point
does ring true when we ponder such all-too-common financial straits: namely,
that we ourselves create the very dilemmas we find inescapable. To return to
the metaphor of the forest, we are lost in a thicket. The real dilemma,
though, is that in dealing with the unpleasant situation we find ourselves
in, we often lose perspective. We deal with things in an incomplete,
piecemeal fashion. We sell the car and buy a cheaper model, but the money
supposedly saved seems to go elsewhere, and our debts remain. In fact, they
accumulate. We buy expensive, name brand clothes for the kids. The best
kitchen appliances. The best furniture we can possibly afford. The best
everything we can possibly afford. And then, in a very real way, we feel we
have "made it." Look at all of our "stuff," we say. It
shows that we are living our lives to the best of our ability. We feel proud
and fulfilled, until we take a look at our meager savings.
Juliet Schor, in her book, The
Overspent American, tells us that Americans today have less real value
saved in the bank than we did forty years ago. Rather than save, she says, we
buy and buy and buy, and then earn and earn and earn.
To finance their
lifestyles, millions of families sent a second earner into the workplace [in
the last ten years], but this created a squeeze on household work and family
time. Despite working all these hours, somewhere between a quarter and 30
percent of households live paycheck to paycheck. With the margin of error so
thin, it is not surprising that personal bankruptcies are at historic levels.
What has gone wrong, we ask? We sold our
BMW for a Toyota,
but we're still deeply in debt and have no money in the bank. The problem
lies in our mindsets, the very way in which we perceive our place in the
world. "We can't see the forest for the trees."
In a consumer society, we have somehow
come to see the meaning of life itself translated into the number and quality
of possessions we have. The consequences, as Juliet Schor suggests, are
myriad, not the least of which is the impact on family life, on quality time
spent together with the ones we love. The home has become a place we hurry
through on our way to jobs and shopping sprees and engagements--all of which
feed into the "accumulative" mindset we have acquired. If we
accumulate enough things and "outside" experiences, then we are
living. The effect, however, is a loss of slow and easy time together, time
for our personalities, our very fabric of laughter and quirkiness and dreams
and sorrows, to unfold in the healthy rhythm of life.
The Earth Itself as Our Home
The earth is another story. It's not a
bank account we can empty with the vague notion that we can add a few dollars
to now and then and feel we're that much further from being broke. Nor is it
a credit card with which we can spend money we do not have. And yet, this is
the very mindset we use in our lives upon this earth. We "spend"
the earth's resources every time we start up our gas-guzzling SUVs, for
instance. And, what is worse, we then pollute the air and the waters with the
enormous emissions of these vehicles, "flooring" the gas pedal from
stop light to stop light, completely oblivious to the fact that not only what
kind of vehicle we drive but also the way we drive has catastrophic
consequences on the environment. And, in the end, it is all a matter of
mindset--of how we live. We have been so blessed in America to
think that the world is bottomless in its ability to give, that we are slow
to realize that our values must change. Whether it be the vehicles we drive,
or the land we gobble up in continuous development, or the throw-away
mentality we have with our plastics, we're regrettably living with the wrong
notion. We cannot have and have and have, and take and take and take, without
there being very real consequences from an earth that is limited in its
abilities to give. And if we don't realize this fact now, our children are
the ones who will pay with an earth that is both largely polluted, denuded,
and bankrupt of its resources.
Changing the Way We Think
The Norwegian philosopher and ecologist
Arne Naess tells us that we must strive for what he calls a "deep
ecology." It is an ecology that demands that we ask "deeper"
questions about our values and our very relation to the planet on which we
live. A "shallow ecology" is the term he gives to the piecemeal
solutions we invoke in our daily lives. We may obligingly recycle our paper
and glass and plastics, for instance, all the while continuing to drive our
SUVs--or any vehicle we insist on driving too much. We thus "fix"
one small part of our lives while continuing the damage in other parts.
Professor Naess calls this
"shallow" and essentially self-centered in its denial of
responsibility. A "deep ecology" would invoke a complete
revisioning of our relation to the world. We must see, he says, that humans
are simply one species of life the earth has given birth to. The millions of
other species of animal and plant life that have arisen from the fertile
earth, are not only equally worthy of living, they and their well-being are
an exact barometer of how we humans are treating the planet on which we live.
When species die and become extinct, a "cry from the wilderness"
should be telling us we are living wrongly.
I tell my own students, if we were to
awake one morning and discover a large black spot on our left hand, we would
be foolish not to visit a doctor. Perhaps something is systemically wrong
with our bodies. To put that hand in our pocket and say, "Well, I have
another hand," would be a denial tantamount to inviting death. And yet
this is what we do when our bays and our rivers die. It is what we do when we
see electronic signs on the freeway proclaiming, "Ozone Alert Day: Air
Quality is Poor," and we blithely say, "Yes, but I am fine
myself."
We are not "fine" ourselves. If
we choose to put our own "black-spotted" hands in our pockets and
continue to have and have and use and use, think what we would do if we
discovered such a "spot" on our own child's hand. Would we take her
to the doctor? Or would we say, "You have another hand, little
one."
The earth we give to our children is not
big. It is small. And there are many such "black spots" we
ourselves have created. Let us doctor ourselves before the malady spreads,
for we are everything involved: the patient, the doctor, and the disease.
We at the Blandair Foundation have a fervent
desire to save the Blandair Farm in Columbia,
Maryland from development. We
wish to protect its pristine 300 acres from conversion into soccer fields,
baseball diamonds and parking lots because it is so environmentally valuable
as a habitat for numerous species of flora and fauna.
The Blandair Farm is also historically
important for its 200-year-old Federalist mansion whose spacious halls and
fourteen-foot ceilings speak of a time and culture long since gone. One only
need venture up its long, unpaved drive to enter a world it would do us well
to remember in our hurried, frighteningly thin lives of acquisitions and
schedules. For there, at the Blandair Farm, not a hundred yards off the busy
traffic of Route 175, one suddenly encounters a silence and an idyllic
landscape that takes us out of ourselves and our pressing concerns. And
perhaps it is this that is most important in our historical appreciation of
the past. However briefly, we become immersed in a different time. We see the
horse pastures. We see the barns, the crop fields. We see the farm laborer's
houses and even the remnants of slave quarters. And maybe we take time to
ponder the daily values of such people who came before us. What did they eat?
How did they dress? How did they order their days, and what did they think
about? What did they love, and what did they fear? And if we have been lucky
enough to become aware of these voices from the past and the lives they
lived, we might hopefully emerge with a deeper sense of who we are ourselves.
The poet Robert Frost was a rural farmer
himself, and his poetry gives us a glimpse of the soul of such a time and
place. In his poem, "After Apple Picking," for instance, we see a
farmer who is exhausted at the end of his day. He writes:
I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, and not let fall.
And earlier in the poem, he tells us of
how his day was spent:
My long two-pointed
ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night . . . .
What we might gain from reading poetry
like this is insight into how people lived beyond mere fact. After swaying on
a ladder against the breezy branches of his apples trees all day, the speaker
in this poem is ready to let his life slide into the "Essence of winter
sleep." When darkness falls, the day is done. It is time for dinner, a
warm fire, family, and sleep. Perhaps this farmer will lie awake for awhile
thinking about "the two or three apples I didn't pick upon some
bough," but his world will be reassuringly the same tomorrow, getting
those last apples down for a trip to the market.
The world Robert Frost portrays may seem
stultifying to some in its very "sameness," but it was also a world
that calls to us through its simplicity. This was indeed a world of hard work
and long hours, but it was also a world of clear and distinct values. What
you sowed was exactly what you reaped.
These are what we at the Blandair
Foundation choose to call "rural values." They are values we
celebrate in the defense of the proposed exploitation of the Blandair Farm.
They are values we feel are rooted in the historical and environmental
protection of a landscape that is endangered. And in the end, they are values
we feel will make us a more wholly appreciative culture of what has gone
before and what we still may have.
Considered and scholarly articles on this
theme are welcomed. Please send your submissions to mgrimes@howardcc.edu. The column is
titled: "Poetry, History and Science" in The Blandair Review.
Over-Development
A "Monopoly" of Uninformed Intentions
Many of us must remember playing the game
Monopoly as kids, where we were encouraged to gobble up as many properties as
possible in the hopes of putting the other players out of business. Many of
us also probably remember the experience of being drummed out of the game as
our best friend, suddenly turned ruthless and unforgiving, demanded $2500 we
didn't have for landing on Boardwalk with a hotel on it. If we were at all
competitive ourselves and desirous of accumulating our own fortunes, we most
likely left the game in a huff. Though, we may have first tried to bargain
with our friend. "Let me pay you in installments," we might have
pleaded. "I will also give you free landing rights on my own properties
if you land there. In addition, I will give you my payday of $200 when I pass
Go." But more often than not, our friend would say, "Sorry, old
buddy, $2500 now, on the barrel head."
And so we early-on witnessed in our
adolescence the transformative power of greed, though it was indeed just a
game. And, moments later, when the winner had won, we might blithely suggest
a game of football out in the streets to work off our frustration and forget
the whole thing.
There is an analogy here that might shed
light on the issue of over-development that is encompassing so many
communities in America
today. The analogy has not so much to do with the momentary greed a childhood
game can foster, though there is that factor too. Rather, what an analogy
between the game of Monopoly and the issue of over-development might serve to
show is the limited nature of available space in the world.
In Monopoly there are forty spaces on the
board, of which only thirty something are available for
"development," the others being allocated for various
"treasure chests," "chances," "taxes," and
"jail," etc. When these "spaces" are completely bought or
consumed, the game, indeed, often becomes a power play of demands, deals and
bargains until the board is controlled or "monopolized" by one
jubilant player. Our friend then owns the entire "world". The
problem is: What does he do with this world once he has drummed everyone else
out of it? The game ends. The winner has nothing to do with his or her
accumulated wealth. If the game were to continue with only one player, we
would see the absurdity of a world without diversity. What would he or she
do? Go around and around the board into a perpetuity of slowly accumulating
funds from the $200 pay day?
Well, the implications from this analogy
are frightening to consider when we apply them to the real world. Developers
are "gobbling" up farmland and forest at an alarming rate. Where,
two years ago we might have seen acres of rolling pasture land, we now often
see communities of town houses, suburban single-family homes, and gargantuan
family-of-four "palaces" that have irrevocably eaten up the
landscape. Where once stood diverse forests of oak and maple, sycamore and
dogwood, which were home to innumerable species of other animal and plant
life--an entire and complex ecosystem--there now exists a devastatingly
simplified system of macadam roads and chemically-treated lawns.
The natural life that has
lived there for years will have scattered or been decimated. The natural
world will have been diminished, never to return. We will spray our lawns
with chemicals, see the runoff clog our waters with excess nitrogen, watch
the streams and rivers and bays die to the fish and oysters and crabs that
call them home, and we will continue on our way until the game ends. And
then? When the Monopoly board that the earth is fast becoming has been
consumed and "developed" beyond repair, there may indeed be a bird
or two, a grackle or starling flitting about, when we decide that we'd like
to leave the "game" and toss a football around in the streets, but
there will be no other game to play. This once-and-only game board upon which
we play out our lives will be dead to the natural diversity that sustains the
earth. We ourselves may indeed leave the "game" with something in
the pockets of our souls, but our children's children may curse the way we
played.
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