Thoreau said that for every thousand people hacking at the branches of evil, only one attacks the roots. Attacking the roots is unpopular because many true solutions involve fundamental changes in the way we live. Many who propose those changes tend to be written off as impractical, or even fanatics. John Davis is one of those people.
I got to know John through a mutual friend, Doug Peacock. John lives in a simple log cabin tucked in the woods near Westport, New York, in the Adirondacks. Westport is the same town that I lived in for four years, and it’s where I started Heron Dance. In fact, when we first talked, we discovered that John's cabin was the same one that I had lived in one cold winter just after my marriage broke up. Since then, John and I have become good friends, canoeing the rivers and hiking the forests of the eastern Adirondacks. When I visit John, I often find him sitting with some sort of work or with a book beside a beaver pond. Most days he is out for a few hours hiking the woods, or he’s walking or cycling backcountry roads.
To many of his friends, John is an anachronism. A wonderfully kind, gentle and considerate person, with an incredible breadth of knowledge on the environmental movement and a huge array of friends; he also has many unique habits and a deep affinity for solitude. I respect him for living his convictions and for his ability to build connections and friendships with so many people who do not share his convictions or, when they do, lack the discipline to live them. He lives on less money than anyone I know, reminding me again of Thoreau who wrote that when he offered to maintain certain poor persons as comfortably as he maintained himself, "they have one and all unhesitatingly preferred to remain poor."
John has poured the bulk of his meager earnings into land acquisition for the nature reserve that now goes by the name The Split Rock Wildway, a project to which he has attracted substantial support, including from the North East Wilderness Trust. Heron Dance supports John’s work through a regular monthly donation to the North East Wilderness Trust/Split Rock Wildway project when it is impractical for us to use recycled paper. When recycled paper has to be trucked or shipped long distances, we feel that making a donation directly to the purchase and protection of wilderness makes more sense than shipping paper around the country or the globe.
John volunteered for Earth First! right out of college and before long was editing the Earth First! Journal. In the process, he became a close friend of Dave Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First!, and when that organization split apart, they started Wild Earth, a national publication that linked the conservation activist and conservation biologist communities. Wild Earth is now defunct, but when it existed it was closely affiliated with The Wildlands Project, which promotes the connection of wilderness areas by corridors through which plants and animals can migrate. At particular risk in the current system of isolated pockets of wilderness are wide-ranging carnivores such as grizzly bears, wolves and certain species of raptors. The Wildlands Project proposes that we allow these creatures enough habitat to maintain viable gene pools. Without them, there is no true wilderness.
In mid-May 1997, John and I paddled the Bouquet River in the Adirondacks. Most of what follows is from our conversation after dark one evening during that trip. We were camped beside a rapids that we were to shoot the next morning, more or less without mishap. I asked John what he gets out of the woods. He responded:
"To me, the woods are synonymous with beauty. They are beautiful visually, audibly and in every other sense. That beauty is central to my life. The woods are where I find relaxation. I have always had a fundamental belief that nature is good and that human destruction of nature is wrong. That has been my deep, intuitive belief for as long as I can remember. And I've always been suspicious of technology. Without knowing why, I've always assumed that an area is good and valuable to the extent that it is natural and wild.
"One can give all sorts of ecological reasons for wilderness, and I think those are important. Many species need big wilderness to survive. Many ecological processes such as natural fire regimes will only fully function in large wilderness areas. There are lots of good ecological reasons for supporting wilderness, and I heartily endorse them. But those aren't really what have led me to work for wilderness. I seem to have been born believing that wildlife and wilderness are the measure of all value."
I wish you could somehow hear the bird songs resonating from the woods as we talked. The sometimes long pauses in our conversation were filled with the dull roar of rapids and cascades in the background, a pileated woodpecker hammering at a tree and the call of a thrush as evening turned to darkness. John went on to say:
"To me, the modern world is basically backwards. Wilderness is as the world should be. Rather than wilderness consisting of little enclaves surrounded by civilization, humans should be immersed in wilderness. Little islands, little human settlements, surrounded by the wild.
"It is important to say that some views I have are held by only a small percentage of the people I work with at the Wildlands Project and Wild Earth. Most Wildlands proponents do not assert that industrial civilization is incompatible with biodiversity. I believe that in order for a full recovery of biodiversity to occur, industrial civilization has to be peacefully dismantled. Most Wildlands proponents disagree with that. They would say that until the studies are done, we won't know how much of North America needs to be wild to preserve biodiversity.
"One thing we all agree on — we have hundreds of millions of acres of public lands right now in this country. Those lands could easily be protected as wildlife habitat. But unless critical wildlife habitat is connected, many species are vulnerable to inbreeding and even to minor adversities. The Wildlands Project proposes that people living in corridors connecting critical habitat would be asked to consider deeding their land in such a way that upon the death of their children, the land would be turned over to public ownership or to a conservation group like The Nature Conservancy. To encourage that transition, property owners would receive substantial tax benefits. It is important to emphasize that we are not asking people in those corridors to move out. Our opponents have said that we want to force landowners to give away their possessions and start fabricating their own clothing and making their own tools. That's ridiculous. But my personal opinion is that we should gradually start simplifying our lives, gradually start living with less. And slowly, carefully reverse our general direction."
I asked John about the implications of that for human population.
"I know it sounds laughable, but under an ideal scenario I can envision that the human population worldwide would ultimately total only a few million people. It really isn't that long ago — a few thousand years, a small percentage of human existence — that the total human population was only a few million. And I think those numbers will happen again, one way or another. Eventually humans will wake up and realize that we have to live in harmony with nature or we will self-destruct. ... There is a taboo in this country about going backwards. Reversing course is inconceivable to most Americans. But I think that the most sensible thing we could do is to gradually turn around and walk back from whence we came. Go back very slowly, very carefully, very peacefully toward an agrarian society, small-scale agriculture and beyond. Gradually lower our population through lower birth rates."
I asked John if he rides his bike or rows primarily to save money or for ecological reasons.
"It's primarily an ecological issue although my income is small enough and my debts are large enough from trying to buy and save land that financial considerations are serious for me. If I wasn't careful, I'd lose my land to a bank. But my primary motivations are ecological. And symbolic, as well. I admit, when I row my boat across the lake, most times I could get on the ferry, and the ferry wouldn't burn any more gas. The ferry is running anyway. But on some symbolic level, every time we propel ourselves with our own muscles rather than fossil fuel, we are making a worthwhile statement. Even if nobody sees it. There is value in not supporting a fossil-fuel economy."
John enjoys Bruce Springsteen music every now and again. I asked him about the Polartec clothes he sometimes wears, the computers that Wild Earth uses and the ABS canoe we are paddling on this river. Industrial infrastructures underlie those products. I said to him, "Even you, who are more pure than anyone I know, can get to the point where you are ineffective — or miserSecret Pond Limited Edition Printable — cold, wet, hungry."
He responded, "I never let myself go that far toward simplicity. I often feel the tension between what I know to be ecologically correct with respect to my own impact on the biosphere, and trying to do what I think might allow me to function effectively. That balance is very hard to find. I have never really felt that I had it right. Actually, I feel now that I am as close to having it right as I ever have, but I still wonder.
I wondered aloud: "What do you think of friends like me and Tom Butler (until recently managing editor, and now editor, of Wild Earth) who drive?"
To which John said:
"I am often judged in a negative way because of the way I live, and it has made me very sensitive about judging others. So I don't judge other people on the way they live. Judging leads to unhappiness and resentment. Also most of my friends — you and Tom and most of my friends — live much more simply than the average middle-class American. So even if I were to judge you and Tom and other close friends, I would judge you quite well."
One evening John and I ate dinner with George Davis of Ecologically Sustainable Development. George is a McArthur "genius" award winner and is widely respected for his environmental work in the Adirondacks and in Siberia and Mongolia. "Of course," George said, "economics determines whether or not anything really significant happens in environmental work as in everything else in this society. Nothing changes unless the economics are favorable." I asked John what he thought about that.
"Wilderness destruction happens even when the economics are adverse to resource extraction. Our national forests are logged at a huge cost to taxpayers. I think we sometimes do need to use economic arguments to appeal to people, and to win protection for forests and support for wolf restoration, but I don't think we will protect much of the natural world through economic arguments. Large-scale, multi-national capitalism and industry are fundamentally incompatible with the natural world. People need to value the natural world for itself, not its economic utility. Using economic arguments to fight timber sales in the short term is fine, but every time we use those economic arguments, we need to say, `The economics are against this timber sale, but even if they were favorable, the sale would still be wrong.'"
The main opposition to wilderness preservation comes from a group who call themselves the Wise Use movement, a consortium of loggers, miners, their employers, major oil and gas companies, and manufacturers of off-road vehicles (motorcycles, ATVs, etc.). Starting about 10 years ago, through aggressive advertising and financial contributions to political campaigns, the Wise Use movement began to dominate public debate over the use of national forests and other public lands. I asked John what the state of that debate has been recently.
"The good news is that the Wise Use movement may be fragmenting. The bad news is that they have been very effective and continue to be effective on many issues. They are a strange combination of legitimately concerned local people, redneck thugs, and big industry money. They include a surprisingly large contingent who holds this notion that environmentalists and the federal government are somehow in cahoots with the United Nations to take over private property and deprive individuals of their liberties.
"The real issue is fear over diminishing resources, and that fear is manipulated by big industry. As the pie gets smaller and smaller and it gets divided among more and more people, there is more and more fighting over what remains. When environmentalists try to set aside some of the remaining resources for protection, it stirs up controversy. Into this debate, companies such as Exxon and Dupont and Conoco throw substantial amounts of money. They want to see all public lands opened to resource extraction. Their lobbyists are very effective — manipulating the fears of some, while simultaneously using money very shrewdly in the political process. And there is some truth to some of what the "Wise Users" say. Humans have to use nature to live, but no, we don't have to turn our public lands over to big industry and yahoos on ATVs. Public lands ought to be set aside as wildlife habitat. To the extent that we need to exploit natural resources, we should do so on private lands.
"The irony is that these people claim to represent the rights of private property owners; but in fact, letting the large timber companies and mining companies exploit public lands, hurts small land owners. Private woodlot owners can't compete against major timber companies whose logging is subsidized by the government.
"Society is going in two directions. There is growing support for The Wildlands Project, and its very ambitious idea of North American wilderness recovery. The idea of large, interconnected ecological reserve systems — wilderness areas — seems to be catching on. The Wildlands Project is really influencing the larger conservation community. That is encouraging. At the same time however, we are seeing real retrenchment in some places. Wilderness areas are being targeted for de-classification, national parks are being opened to motorized recreation and environmental standards weakened.
"At some level we all know what is right and good — the natural world"
"Americans consistently favor environmental and wilderness protection in public opinion polls and yet they consistently do the opposite in their day-to-day activities. At some level we all know what is right and good — the natural world — and yet we run roughshod over it. This has always puzzled me. If 80 percent of us know that we ought to protect wildlife habitat, and we need to stop polluting the atmosphere; why do only a tiny percentage do so? It is a great puzzle. How do we get people to actually live by the ideals that we know are right and that most of us at some level share?
"I think that one of the reasons that environmentalists and conservationists have failed so often is that we don't really understand sociology and psychology. The people who understand sociology and psychology are in the business world. They are in marketing. In advertising. Those of us who work on behalf of the natural world tend to be quite ignorant of those subjects. I really don't know how mainstream Americans think. We need to learn that."
From there our conversation shifted to the politics of the environmental and wilderness protection movements. I asked John if he had a view on the effectiveness of small grassroots groups versus the big environmental organizations such as the Sierra Club and the National Audubon Society.
"The whole spectrum of groups and approaches are necessary, and they should compliment each other. It is almost always a mistake for one group to use one approach, then to criticize another group who uses another approach. We ought to see our various tactics as complementary. That said, without people from the local area on your side, you are not likely to gain protection for an area. Building strong local constituencies is the forte of grassroots groups, and it’s crucial."
I asked John if that was why he had gone to work for Earth First! rather than a major national organization.
"While I was going to college, I did some volunteer and low-paid work for a couple of environmental groups: The Kentucky Rivers Coalition and Appalachia Science in the Public Interest, a group founded and still run by the Jesuit priest, Albert J. Fritsch. My experiences with those groups were very rewarding and made me realize that a lot of valuable work was being done by small, under-funded groups — many struggle desperately to stay afloat financially. I noticed early on that they had tremendous difficulties and yet they were very committed. I remember in particular taking a trip to Washington, D.C., with Al Fritsch. By that time, I had worked quite a while for Al and was impressed by his dedication and accomplishments. We visited a couple of the mainstream groups in Washington, D.C., and I was just floored by the contrast. These groups had lush offices with large staffs. They didn't seem to be working especially hard. They were obviously rolling in money compared to the small grassroots groups. That made me realize that if I wanted to do as much as possible for the natural world, I ought to stick with small grassroots groups and not try to get into the mainstream environmental movement.
"The mainstream groups, the Big Ten — groups like the Natural
Resources Defense Council and National Audubon Society — share some members
of the boards of directors with large corporations or get sizeable portions
of their budgets from large corporations or from people with links to large
corporations. That colors their agendas and causes them to be less ambitious
than they would otherwise be and makes them willing to compromise. But despite
this, and despite the fact that they waste a lot of money, they also do a lot
of good. Grassroots groups accomplish more in relation to their resources than
do the mainstream groups, but we need both. We need large organizations in Washington
lobbying and putting pressure on Congress and the President, but we also need
small, grassroots groups out in the field standing in front of bulldozers. We
need the full spectrum from Earth First! to the Audubon Society. It's unfortunate
when conservationists on one end of this spectrum decide that those on the other
end are corrupt or counter-productive."Raincoast Flight Detail Limited Edition
Print
I asked John how he would rate the big groups: "My guess is that the Sierra
Club is about as radical as a large group can be without imperiling its funding
sources. The National Audubon Society could probably be more radical. The National
Wildlife Society and The Wilderness Society could probably be more radical.
The Sierra Club takes some fairly strong stands — they are now officially in
favor of a total ban on commercial logging in the national forests. They appointed
Dave Foreman and David Brower to their board. The Sierra Club opposed NAFTA.
The Sierra Club leadership often makes strong statements opposing the status
quo."
I asked John how he met Doug Peacock. "I was working on the Earth First! Journal,
and we would have these mailing parties, and Doug would come sweeping in, usually
in something of a storm, often times with a friend like Jim Harrison or Dan
Sullivan. Generally, they'd have had a drink or two and often they'd be in quite
a wild mood. And, very often, Doug's young children would be in tow. The kids
were balls of energy as well. The mailing parties would suddenly become very
exciting and energetic. We didn't really trust him to get the labels on right,
but he'd go over to one end of the room and start talking, and we would do the
work. He would be the entertainment. Doug would come around to the Earth First!
office fairly often, which was always a treat."
In the years 1989 and 1990, Earth First! began to break up, eventually dividing
into Earth First! and Wild Earth. One reason was an FBI infiltration and the
subsequent arrest of Dave Foreman. But other changes were affecting the group,
and I asked John what happened.
"Earth First! was already going through upheaval when the FBI crackdown happened.
The FBI infiltration created a lot of tension in the movement and hurt a lot
of people emotionally and psychologically. It hurt me and hurt Dave. It caused
a lot of fragmentation in Earth First!, but it was by no means the only reason
for the breakup. There was a growing divergence within the movement between
people who wanted Earth First! to be everything radical and to take on every
ecological and social cause, and those of us who wanted Earth First! to stick
with uncompromising advocacy for the natural world. There was something of a
generation gap happening between the old guard and the newer recruits — many
who lived in California and some of whom were at least as interested in social
as in ecological issues. Some were into rebellion for the hell of it. They were
in their early twenties and wanted to be radical.
"At a campfire at an Earth First! rendezvous in New Mexico in 1989, someone
stood up and asked why Earth First! wasn't taking a position on rent control.
In retrospect, that was a turning point for many of us. Rent control may be
an important issue, but it's not our issue. Earth First! was about the earth.
Some of the so-called old guard — and even though I was very young, I hung out
with the old guard — started realizing that things were going off in a tangent.
We wanted to focus solely on wilderness and wildlife. So even apart from the
FBI infiltration and the tension that caused, many of us started to feel that
we wanted to do something different; but the FBI infiltration definitely further
fragmented things. So we created another organization to get back to a focus
on wildlife and wilderness issues.
"Earth First! began in 1980 with some fairly specific goals: to revitalize and
radicalize the environmental movement — shift the spectrum of the debate and
get people thinking about big wilderness again. By the end of the 1980s that
had largely been accomplished. To go further we needed the support of conservation
biologists. We needed to use arguments based on science because the science
strongly supports the need for large ecological reserves — big wilderness.
"Our efforts got a big boost when Reed Noss agreed to be Wild Earth's science
editor. Reed Noss is as highly regarded as any conservation biologist in the
country. Even though he is outspoken and considered by some to be radical, nobody
doubts the quality of his science and research. By enlisting him from the start,
we gained a lot of credibility in the conservation biology community. For contributors,
we turned to the people who were the most ecologically informed and orientated
among the old Earth First! crowd and to conservation biologists."
John and I have frequently discussed whether work for wilderness is worthwhile,
whether or not it has any real prospect of success. My position has been that
whether we win or lose, it is important to have something that is an integral
part of one's life that is good. John feels that the work has to have some reasonable
prospect of success. The reason we struggle, he says, is to protect the natural
world — not for the struggle itself. I asked John what he would do with his
time if he knew with certainty that the work he does would not have any impact,
that the struggle was hopeless.
"If I knew for certain that the fight was useless," he answered, "That the natural
world was doomed, I would move into my cabin at Hemlock Rock and enjoy the natural
world. I would stop fighting. I would spend my time getting to know my neighbors
— the plants and animals that share Hemlock Rock with me. I would like to learn
how to recognize them, to know how they live. But I wouldn't withdraw from society.
I am not a loner, but I do have a greater need for solitude than some people,
although not as much as others. ...
"I'd also spend time learning to gather my own food. Left to my own devices
now, I'd go hungry. I am dependent on purchased food, and yet I know that there
are many edible plants on my land. But I would probably have to study and experiment
a lot before I could gather an enjoyable, healthy diet. I just have no experience.
...
"I fight discouragement and despair on almost a daily basis, but I sense that
an awakening is slowly happening. Every acre we save is a small victory. Every
species we help save is a small victory. It is not an all or nothing battle.
Even if conservationists and Wildlands advocates don't, during their lifetimes,
achieve their ultimate goals or even their mid-term goals, what they save was
well-worth the effort. I don't believe humans will completely annihilate biodiversity
before we wake up or our civilization collapses. So we need to struggle and
save what we can. Even if we can't win the war, the more battles we win the
better. And enough battles are being won to keep me at it."
Hemlock Rock Wildlife Sanctuary consists of forty-five acres of woods, swamp
and beaver pond. John has posted it with signs that welcome hikers but ask that
no one hunt, fish or drive motorized vehicles on it. He has been working very
hard to help raise money to buy adjoining properties that connect Nature Conservancy
land on one side of him with State land a short distance away. Hemlock Rock
is deeply meaningful to him, and I asked him to talk about that. "Aside from
being a wildlife sanctuary, it is also something of a sanctuary for me. I come
here to escape the bad news that I am exposed to in editing an environmental
publication. I find peace and relaxation here — a home for me as well as for
wildlife — even when I'm working. I get more work done and better work done
— in my cabin or sitting by my pond or out by my swamp. I am more relaxed where
there are no phones and so forth. That is where people belong. People don't
really belong in big cities or in office buildings, particularly on sunny days.
When it's rainy and cold, it seems natural to seek shelter. But you have to
wonder what are we doing to ourselves when we sit in front of a computer when
it is sunny and warm. It seems a sacrilege."
I asked John if spirituality played any role in his reverence for nature. "I
consider myself a spiritual or religious person, depending on how one defines
the terms. I prefer the word religious because spiritual seems to suggest some
sort of dichotomy between spirit and matter. If you look at the root word of
religion it comes from the Latin word `regio' which means to tie or bind. That
has more a positive connotation to me. I am quite willing to accept that life
or aspects of life are spiritual, but I am not sure I am willing to accept that
spirit is separate from matter. I don't think it is. The way some people think
of spirit, I think of energy. I think that the universe is infused with energy.
It's all linked. We are all linked. I think the idea that the universe is one
vast energy field has a lot of truth to it."
When I asked John if he thought there was a cohesive intelligence behind that
energy in the same sense that the human mind is a cohesive source of intelligence,
he responded that he didn't think so. Three Blossoms Limited Edition Print "I
don't feel the need to believe that It has some sort of mind apart from what
we see. What we see is enough. What we see in my opinion is divine and holy
and sacred ... I see God or Goddess or Great Spirit in everything natural, and
whether that energy source or Supreme Being has some sort of mind apart from
what we see, I don't know.
"On a rational level, I am reluctant to believe that there is some sort of mind
or power apart from what we see. But on a subconscious level, I almost assume
there is. I can't quite make sense of it, and I am not sure that I need to reconcile
my subconscious belief with my rational doubt. I am content to feel that the
natural world is sacred and holy and deserves protection. Whatever the word
good means, the natural world is good.
"If I might try to impart a larger message it would be the importance of concerned
conservationists buying and saving land. You can do a lot of good by buying
a piece of land for yourself and setting it aside as wildlife habitat. If we
could convince a few more people around here to do that, Adirondack Park would
be much safer for wildlife. A lot of land is for sale. And it's quite cheap.
But it's under threat of timber cutting and development.... When we feel despair
about the extinction crisis, and feel that our efforts are all for naught, and
we see trees falling and animals being hit by cars and so forth, we should remind
ourselves that the struggle for wildlife and wilderness is worthwhile. It is
not all or nothing. Even if we cannot end the war on nature in our lifetimes,
we can protect a lot of habitat for the time when people do finally wake up."
This is both a fan letter and the picking of what appears to be a somewhat idolatrous "bone." In the most recent issue, these words jumped out at me: "The natural world is the measure of all value" — and I was moved to remember James Hillman's having somewhere noted that we reduce the sphere and soul of our world if grass is all-good and plastic is all-bad.
As a writer/poet/theologian who finds the presence of the Divine and the Gracious in inner-city streets as much as pastoral vistas — and whose range of motion in the largest sense is limited primarily to a vintage Monte Carlo and a manual wheelchair, I would hate to think that those who do not have easy access to "nature" are somehow second-class citizens in the Kingdom of the Holy which surely suffuses all this earth, battered and damaged as it sometimes is.
You do good work. If you didn't, I wouldn't be concerned that it be even better.
Sincerely,
Lynn Park
Lynn,
Thanks. Yes!! There is so much to life that is of value that is not generally considered part of the natural world. Friendship, for instance. And John Davis, speaker of the words to which you refer, is a close enough friend for me to say that I know he values things other than the natural world — friendship being one. His point was, I think, that in his mind the real currency of value isn't money and material goods, but trees, birds and wild places.
More than anything else, Heron Dance wants to present the views of those struggling to live their convictions, searching for alternatives to the dominant paradigm. Sometimes I don't agree with what they have to say, and often they don't agree with each other, but if they are thought-provoking and if the speaker is trying to live them, Heron Dance prints what they have to say.
