On September 14, 2007, author and professor, Kim Stafford was the keynote speaker for our 2nd Annual Green Books & Brown Bags luncheon. His speech delighted us so much, we wanted to share it with all of our members, donors and friends.

Mr. Stafford, son of legendary Oregon writer, William Stafford is Associate Professor of Education and the Director of the NW Writing Institute and the William Stafford Center at Lewis & Clark College. Honored for his contributions to Oregon's literary culture, his work tunes into the natural world and is known for its strong sense of place.

 “Earth Share Oregon”

Remarks by Kim Stafford

14 September 2007 / PSU Smith Browsing Room

Trudy gave us a set of qualities that accompany what we try to do with Earth Share of Oregon: “Health, Sanity, Serenity.” I want to come back to that trio of words in a moment, but first, two little blessings for our work. In honor of Earth Share partner the Nature Conservancy of Oregon…

Trail Register at Cascade Head

Botuful

Way cool

God I’ve missed this

4 deer & beautiful sunset

4 deer and 2 slugs

Rad, cool and tiring

Very buitiful.

So quite and beautiful

My friend died this weekend. This was

   my place to say good-by

I enjoyed the grooviness

Thank you

And from a conversation the other night at home…

Our ten-year-old son writes what he is curious about this year at school. At first he is stumped. School is not an intrinsically interesting question just now. But when we ask what he is curious about in the world, the long sentences begin to flow…

This year I am curious about the point of human existence and the evolutionary function of the ear lobe and what exactly is the sound barrier and what is the outlet point of a black hole and the dimensions of the universe and the recipe for stewed Yak and where to find my favorite kind of Hormel chili that I ran out of. I really want to find out if the smallest bird that lives today (a hummingbird smaller than an eraser cap) has a brain bigger than the largest arthropod (a huge spider that lives in Mongolia that is a foot long and a foot wide). I’d also like to know the table of elements. I know that gold is one of them but I don’t know any others. I want to know why red is the opposite of green.

One way we experience the way life happens may be in some precious variation of Trudy’s holy trio: Health…Sanity…Serenity.

Beginning…Middle…and End.

Mother…Father…Child.

Or the words Thomas Jefferson wrote when the Continental Congress sent him to a room to play his violin and compose their collective aspiration: Life…Liberty…Happiness.

Or the motto of the Russian Revolution: Peace…Land…Bread.

Or the title of a little Gary Snyder book: Good…Wild…Sacred.

Two alone can’t offer the dynamism of the three:

Day and Night? No, we need: Light, Darkness—and Twilight, the difficult, dangerous, beautiful, dynamic time.

Life and Death? Is that enough? Absolutely not. We need Life, Death—and Birth, the perennial gift.

What about Earth Share. Earth…Share? That’s a concept, an ideal, a global aspiration. We need Earth…Share…Oregon. The place makes the concept real. That trio is active: resource, process—and local task.

Today, we in this room have a sacred mantra: Earth…Share…Oregon.

Earth

So earth—the beautiful, the mysterious, the fragile.

My brother was one who worked for the future, an Oregon land-use planner. One day he stood on a bluff above the Columbia with a group of movers and shakers, looking down on a little island in Hood River County. “What shall we do with that?” said the mayor. “We could carve out a little marina on one side, put in some nice homes.” “I’d say gravel,” said the county commissioner. “The world needs gravel. Let’s clear the shipping channel, barge it all away.” There was a beat of silence. “But it’s beautiful,” my brother said. “It’s just beautiful the way it is.” “You can’t eat beauty, Bret,” someone said. “That’s all fine. But you can’t eat beauty.”

And yet…and yet we have to eat beauty. We die without it. We are not “Saving the earth.” That’s not quite it. Through conservation, we give the earth a chance to save us.

How do we eat beauty, then, and yet sustain the health of the earth? In Hawaii, they have the concept of “apua’a”…the three-tiered plan for each stream and watershed:

—the fish in the lagoon will not be abundant if the taro fields in the lowlands are not managed well;

—the taro fields will not be productive if the uplands streams are not kept clean;

—the mountain streams will not be clean if the forest where they travel is not healthy, guarded, cherished.

People go carefully into the mountains to find spirit, or out to sea to find spirit. The human system in field and lagoon is framed by infinite natural process.

Earth is a design and we are students of this design. Our success as humans begins in how well we can read the process of life and change on earth.

The Grove where Herons Roost inside the City is Saved

when the Gravel Magnate offers the Island to the People

Human ownership is a funny thing. The river decided here

at the broad turning where water braids itself a fluid fist

would be a good place to heap up spoil from the mountains—

boulder, riprap, pebble, sand—and cottonwood root went down

to hold it all together, and then earth convened, slowly deepening

as leaves softened to sweet muck more precious to the living

than barren gold. Herons nested where the limbs would hold

a basket of sticks, and sticks would hold the egg, and the shell

opened to share the ancient with the not-yet-known. Earth

shares Oregon where the meeting can be arranged among

the river, the human, and a lucky era for convergence.

Share

We are not talking about sharing the bounty only. We are talking about sharing the privilege of the hard work required to protect the bounty of places we love.

One year at the Fishtrap Gathering , a Nez Perce elder, Horace Axtell, told us this: “If you want to learn to speak Nez Perce, you just need to listen to the birds. They’re all speaking Nez Perce. And they love to say their own names. They love to speak Nez Perce so much, they say their names over and over. The robin, in the evening, says its Nez Perce name: wispoxpox, wispoxpox.

And the raven, if you listen, is saying its Nez Perce name: Achach, Achach…

           The Lost Old Lady

When the truck got stuck in the mountains

she walked with her man of fifty years

for help, but then got tired and hungry.

"Go back and rest," he said. "I'll

go on and find someone." Light

jacket, soft shoes, she started

back along the road, then wandered.

The old man got help, came to the truck,

no wife. It was night, then day again.

First the rescue squad seeking her, then dogs.

Nights dropping to the 30s, weeks passed.

They planned a service to remember her.

But deep in a canyon, beside a stream

she lay. Two ravens circled over her.

She spoke softly to herself, a child telling

words in babble, singsong, whisper, hum.

                              #

In Oregon, we are different one from another. We are desert, mountain, valley, coast. We are rural, urban. We are right wing, left wing. We call ourselves liberal, conservative, independent—though it gets complex when the conservative impulse wants to conserve farms, rivers, forests, and the liberal impulse wants to let the cities rule the land.

I had a dream of the one-winged eagle struggling mightily to fly.

                Politics

If I were the Right Wing

I would need to work very hard

to hold up my side of the eagle.

If I were the Left Wing, hard again—

reaching when there is no lifting wind,

and gravity gets more greedy the bigger

we have become. But both wings in rhythm,

both wings for one journey, remembering we are

two hands in one prayer, and if we don’t

get back together soon, the eaglets

waiting in that castle of bleached sticks

won’t make it.

So we share in the work this earth requires. And sometimes, outside of politics, oblique from confrontation, free of needing-to-win-one–way, we manage to enjoy our differences. Sharing becomes utterly practical to get the hard work done, and a pleasure.

Perhaps some of you have met the Buddhist nun who moved to Wallowa County, where she sustains the retreat for anyone up Hurricane Creek.

Buddhist in Cattle Country

We heard a rumor she was on her way

to spend time in a quiet place alone

and met her first at the barbeque

out to the Z Ranch where

you had to see it through

her eyes: smoking carcasses

on spits turned slowly

over the mesquite coals.

God, that meat was good.

Burl knows how to fix it right.

You had to give her credit,

too: she sipped a beer

and asked how cold it got

hereabouts, and where

could you go for books,

and was the sky always

amazing and gold like that?

Earth…Share…Oregon.

Oregon

We live on earth, we learn to share, and our work is Oregon.

                        For My Friends

When a river is a border on a map, and not a place to swim;

when a mountain is a postcard you could get;

when an otter is like music in a special on TV,

and not a whiskered stranger you have met;

when smoke from campfires is something known from books

and not a pungent remnant in your clothes;

when forests are but fables, and caves in fairy tales,

and deserts empty places no one knows;

when children learn from Mickey of the mouse,

and think they know the world but never leave the house;

when from busy cities the wilderness feels distant as a star—

then we have lost our treasure, and missed the means to measure

      who we are.

Friends, our work is clear—

to hear the sound where water moves;

to measure mountains with our feet;

to seek the mouse in meadows when the dew is on;

to know each huckleberry with the tongue—

leave our blunders, seek new wonders,

entrust the tender world to the young.

                           #

How do we do that? How doe we share the earth with the citizens of Oregon we will never meet, who inherit from us what we have done, accomplished, saved, and most of all, perhaps, managed to leave alone?

FOUR SCORE AND SEVEN YEARS FROM NOW our descendants will inherit in this place an older earth conceived in diversity and dedicated to the recognition that all creatures share as one. Now we are engaged in a great struggle, testing whether this creation so conceived and so dedicated can long endure. We are met in a great community for that struggle. We have come to dedicate a portion of our grief as a final resting-place for those creatures who gave their lives departing from this creation. It is fitting and proper that we should do this. In a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this creation. The desperate creatures, neglected children, vibrant cultures and local ways of being, living and dead, who struggled here have consecrated it far above our poor power to add or detract. Oregon will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what we now choose to do. It is for us the living rather to be dedicated to the unfinished work which they who struggled and lost here have thus far so painfully clarified. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us—that from these tattered beauties we take increased  devotion to that cause for which they lost their last full measure of living witness and of song—that we here highly resolve that these lost beauties shall not be joined by an endless parade of others long in splendor, suddenly gone, that this whole earth shall have a new birth in welcome to its own, and that reconciliation of all creatures, by all creatures, for all creatures shall not perish from the earth.

                                                #

Earth…Share…Oregon.

                                                          #

Notes:

“Trail Register at Cascade Head,” published in Open Spaces.

“Buddhist in Cattle Country,” published in High Desert Journal.

“For My Friends,” composed for the U.S. Forest Service at the Cispus Learning Center, 2006.

“Four score and seven years from now…,” composed for the Northwest Sustainability Forum.

                                                          #