A portrait of Dan Kemp.

By Caroline Ailanthus:

Dan Kemp was an unusual student who became a Whole Terrain co-editor in the usual way; like several other editors over the years, he took the “Literature of the Land” course with Rowland Russell and Fred Taylor. He also joined a writing group led by Russell, who is Managing Director of Whole Terrain.

“I liked the course and the involvement with writing at Antioch, so when Rowland suggested that I might be a candidate it seemed like a natural next step. Some encouraging words from prior editors also helped.”

Kemp attended Antioch University New England through the Self-Designed Studies program, which itself places him in somewhat rare company. He also came to Antioch as a retiree, meaning that, unlike most Whole Terrain editors, Kemp had no plans to use graduate school to launch a new, full-time career. Whether this gave him a different perspective on his work as an editor he does not say, though he does list the age difference as the first of several reasons why he and co-editor, Martha Campagna, “couldn’t have been more different as people.” None of these differences ended up causing a problem, and he says he was lucky to work with her.

“We were completely aligned in our tastes and approaches. We liked and disliked the same things and we never had a significant disagreement. Most of our editorial meetings happened over coffee at Brewbakers.”

Their volume’s topic, “Boundaries,” was chosen by the editorial board before Kemp was hired, but he considers it a good choice, “specific enough to give potential authors something to react to, yet broad enough to encompass a range of contributions.”

Whole Terrain accepts unsolicited submissions, but both Kemp and Campagna also asked for contributions from friends, fellow students, authors they did not know but admired, and people suggested by board members. They ultimately received far more material than they could publish, and writing rejection letters, especially to authors they had personally asked to contribute, was one of the harder things Kemp had to do as editor. He spent a lot of time making his rejections as encouraging and constructive as possible. Nor were rejection letters the only place where Kemp had to be constructively critical.

“One surprise was how much editing most submissions required, and this was true even of the work of some of well-known contributors. In some cases, the piece would need a complete structural rearrangement or removal of distracting extraneous material and subthemes. It was very satisfying when I could help turn a choppy, rambling piece into a tight, smoothly-flowing, well-crafted essay. I found the professional writers readily accepted suggestions, while some of the less-experienced writers were a little more resistant.”

Two years later, Kemp still mentally rewrites non-fiction as he reads it.

These days, Dan Kemp is involved with five different conservation or environmental education organizations, including the Squam Lakes Natural Science Center, the Harris Center, and the board of Whole Terrain. He gives natural history talks, writes, and designs websites, and is increasingly interested in documentary filmmaking. He is in the process of consolidating his various efforts into a single project he’s calling Evensong Media. As Kemp explains, its “mission will be to use writing, photography, and video to:

• Tell stories of people who move beyond established categories and boundaries to find new alliances and collaborations for the common good.
• Honor people who by artistry, teaching, or stewardship, enrich, harmonize, and protect our world.
• Create original work that fosters understanding of, appreciation for, and attachment to place.”

Kemp finds a lot of parallels between filmmaking and his work for Whole Terrain:

“Like writing, constructing a film involves planning and creating a story. But to actually tell the story you must select and carefully arrange a few precious minutes of from many hours of video and audio. This part is feels more like editing—in fact, that is what it is called.”

Dan Kemp did not come to Antioch, or Whole Terrain to start a new career, but that doesn’t mean he has no plans. Now, a year after getting his degree, “various threads of interests are coming together for me, and I am excited about some of the new ventures I am undertaking.”

Caroline Ailanthus is a graduate of Antioch’s Conservation Biology program and a full-time free-lance writer. She specializes in working with clients on conservation-related projects.

In the fall of 2011, Gregory McNamee, author or editor of 35 books and countless shorter works, received an invitation to contribute to Whole Terrain’s “Net Works” volume. The timing, McNamee recalls, was perfect. He had been thinking about the same topic, “connecting the natural networks of energy flow and biological information with the human networks of education and activism….” He had also been thinking about the Rosemont Mine, a proposed open pit mining project near Tucson, Arizona, an ancient landscape dear to his heart. The result of McNamee’s thinking, the incandescent piece, “The Worth of a Mountain,” is as gritty and silken as the land itself.

In his writing, McNamee describes the ancient cultural and biological richness of the Cienega, a rare year-round wetland in the heart of the desert, and how the hydrology that feeds it could be permanently disrupted by the proposed mine. He points out that the worth of this place is not the type typically recognized in court or valued by accountants and that the money realized from the mine would not stay in the area, anyway. The mine would make its far-away owners rich, leaving nothing to recompense the local people for the loss of their water.

“The Cienega watershed offers a story that is just one of countless many in the arid West,” McNamee says, “a tale in which something other than water is taken as the thing of primary value, when of course water is the most precious resource of all. But then, that’s true of other parts of the country: everywhere the future ghost of Dick Cheney roams in the form of fracking, killing water sources as it tramps upon the land, we see that lesson playing out.” But La Cienega has captured his attention and he has been following the issue carefully. A book may come out of this interest, McNamee’s third book about Western water.

“It turns out that it’s a very old [story] in a new guise: the history of the West is a history of economic colonialism, with people out here only too happy to sell out to the colonists for a mess of pottage, and with resources flowing by the boxcar and tanker truck load to distant places—in this case, very likely, China, while the money will flow to Australia, Canada, England, everywhere but Arizona.”

McNamee has what he describes as “convert’s love of the cause of the desert, and a non-native’s appreciation for why this place is different from greener, softer, easier places.” He is originally from Virginia, near Washington, DC. After watching so much of his home landscape being paved over, he relocated to the Southwest. “I thought I’d go someplace that valued its history and was less inclined to growth for its own sake—the ideology, my old friend Ed Abbey used to point out, of the cancer cell.” He says his logic was flawed. Either that, or his timing was bad. “Alas, no sooner did I arrive then did Tucson explode: when I moved here [in 1975] the population was about 300,000, and it’s now more than a million, and much of the best of this place was torn down long ago.”

Yet McNamee remains loyal to his adopted home. He is a research associate and lecturer at the University of Arizona, as well as a member of the Speaker’s Bureau of the Arizona Humanities Council. He is a prolific writer and editor, and the Southwest, both the land and its people, appear again and again among his literary works. He puts it, “every time I travel—and I’m always going somewhere or another—I find myself missing this dry, hot, spiky, spiny country.”

Readers interested in following the story of La Cienega and the Rosemont Mine will have to “dig deep,” as McNamee puts it, to get really good information. “The issue is surrounded by lots of emotion and a fair amount of misdirection. The Arizona Daily Star and Tucson Weekly have done good work in covering the above-the-ground facts, though, not surprisingly, without much historical context. A reader would do just as well to look at the question of resources and their use and abuse in the West generally, for which I’d refer him or her to Charles Bowden’s Killing the Hidden Waters, Donald Worster’s Rivers of Empire, and William DeBuys’s A Great Aridness for starters. Going deeper, Tom Sheridan’s Arizona: A History turns out to be a history of the race to extract as many resources as possible from this place, a story that begins long before the arrival of Europeans.”

In addition to offering suggestions to readers, McNamee also wanted to give some advice to writers, beginning with a plea for solution-based environmental writing.

“In my view, large segments of our desired audience tune environmental talk out because it’s descriptive instead of prescriptive: we offer Cassandra cries, but too often not much direction or encouragement.” Ideally, he’d like the world of environmental literature to include “lots of specific suggestions for ways in which to improve our condition, and lots of alternatives.” The world does need more of this.

Read more about Gregory McNamee’s current endeavors at his website.

By Caroline Ailanthus:

Michael Metivier, the editor of Whole Terrain’s Volume 19, Net Works, is our most recent “alumnus,” so when we decided to catch up with our previous editors, it felt natural to start with him. Over the next few months, we’ll check in with as many of our former editors as we can. After all, as Whole Terrain approaches its twentieth birthday, it seems a good time to celebrate both the work we have done and the many great people we have been privileged to work with.

Metivier is a poet, a musician, and a naturalist, as well as a recent graduate of Antioch’s “self-designed” program. As he explains, Whole Terrain was part of his graduate studies from the beginning, or even before the beginning.

“I met Rowland Russell, Whole Terrain’s Managing Director, at a writers’ retreat on Cape Cod back in 2010, when I was applying to AUNE. My ambition in self-designing a Master’s program was to combine courses in writing and communications with those in natural history. Rowland and I had many long conversations about writing, music, and literature that weekend that made applying for the editor position almost an obvious decision.”

Metivier does not quite say that he chose Antioch because of Whole Terrain, but it is at least fair to say that his work as a student and his work as an editor arose from the same spring.

“Part of what motivated me to go back to school in general was the realization that I was reading more and more environmental non-fiction of all kinds, and that was inspiring my own creative work almost to the exclusion of anything else. So I wanted to explore it more formally.”

Asked what being an editor what like and what he valued about the experience, Metivier immediately cites the opportunity to collaborate with such a wide range of people, all of them approaching environmental practice in different ways. He also fondly remembers having a good reason to buy a lot of books. Being a Whole Terrain editor was an opportunity to really ground himself in both canonical environmental literature and in newer work that expands, and even defies, the idea of “nature writing.”

Metivier was also struck by “just how collaborative the entire process of editing is. For better or worse–mostly better!–you are not handed dictatorial reins…. Every decision, from the theme (which was a combination of Editorial Board brainstorm and a smattering of crowd-sourcing) to the content, to the running order and everything else, required and deserved input from the board, contributors, designer, illustrator, and myself. This both alleviated some of the pressure…and made some of the decisions precarious, where you’re juggling very reasonable but conflicting ideas and opinions, not least of which [is] your own vision and aesthetic.”

As a recent university graduate, Metivier is still looking for full-time work while volunteering for Mass Audubon’s Arcadia Wildlife Sanctuary, where he assists with educational nature programming. He is still involved with Whole Terrain as both an Associate Managing Editor and interim board member for the upcoming twentieth volume. He continues his own personal creative work through poetry, personal essays, and music; he has begun work on a new album of original songs.

Not surprisingly, Metivier sees connections between the work he does now and his work with us.

“Working as a Whole Terrain editor, in addition to giving me direct experience [with] the specifics of that line of work, strengthened and cemented skills that are applicable in most lines of future work, particularly education, which I tend to view more now as a collaborative effort between student and teacher than simple top-down instruction.”

Of course, we don’t like to let too much time to go by without catching up with someone this interesting, but the drawback to our doing this profile of Metivier now is that we don’t yet know how his experiences as editor will mature in him over time. We want to listen to that album of new songs. We want to read his poetry years hence and see if we can discern traces of Whole Terrain there. We want to know the rest of the story, as it were. What does seem clear is that he looks back on his work here fondly, and that just as he brought a rich an interesting volume into being, he remembers his work as an experience of richness in his own life.

“What I valued most came from all of the different collaborations, and being able to reflect on my own communication strengths and weaknesses in that regard. At different stages of the process I felt like a carpenter, promoter, shepherd, cheerleader, teacher, but throughout the whole thing I was always first and foremost a student and listener, of everyone I worked with.”

Cover of Whole Terrain printed issue 19: Net Works

Read more here

Flying west from Hartford to Milwaukee, forehead pressed against the airplane window, I watch the landscape change miles below as the plane shoulders into the earth’s rotation. The Adirondacks and Great Lakes make impressive signposts along the way, but I am struck more by the evolution of the nation’s roadways. In little over two hours, the jumble of gussied up deer- and cowpaths of my native Northeast gives way to the orderly grid of the Midwest, where my wife was born and raised.

The shift from haphazard layout on the East Coast toward geometric latticework farther west was due in large part to the relative flatness of topography in the continental interior, as well as to advances in surveying and technology. It also reflected a growing desire for efficiency: to connect two points by the shortest distance possible, to maximize the amount of work the nation could accomplish in the least amount of time.

In Austin Feldbaum’s essay on New Orleans, “The Neutral Ground,” the Louisiana native reflects on the societal and environmental consequences of mid-twentieth century urban planning, which sought to streamline the city’s commercial traffic system, sacrificing the health and vitality of inner city neighborhoods in the process. Susan Pollack writes in “A Complex of Occasions” about current attempts to transform the economy of Gloucester, Massachusetts from a robust, interconnected community centered on the fishing industry to a more exploitative tourism-based model. Both essays highlight how attempts to iron out complexity in the name of pragmatism or short-term financial benefit often come at the expense of what is most meaningful and sustaining in our lives. To this end, economist Rich Grogan introduces his concept of Net Work Life in an essay of the same name, as a counterpoint to conventional measurements of the net worth of our lives’ works.

Gazing down through the clouds, I wonder if our neural patterning is tied in some way to our formative landscapes. We all have moments of both straight-line and spiral thinking, reflecting the inexhaustible number of routes to get from here to there. As the crow flies, sure, but also the kinglet. Laird Christensen’s journey in “A Tree Falls In The Forest” is toward an understanding of his beloved Oregon forests as places of “dripping, sprouting, swallowing, crumbling, incessant becoming,” where decaying material is as important as living organisms for the health of the system. Luc Phinney’s poem “On the Way to Catoctin” sings of the merging of interior and exterior landscapes during a single morning commute. Both essayist and poet seek clarity through complexity, and vice versa.

Societal desire for clarity of thought and action is evident in the way we visualize the complexity of networks. For example, the maps in the back of the airline magazine I’m reading depict blue lines arcing out of hub cities like fireworks, representing direct, intentional links between locations. Cell phone advertisements work much the same, with friends and relatives serving as the hubs and their conversations as flight-lines, reinforcing the idea of networks as weavings of deliberate choices. It can be comforting to think of ourselves as voluntary nodes in the midst of complex systems, to think that we can switch our connections with the world on and off, even live “off the grid” if we have the will and means. But the way our world appears to us is as much the result of indirect action and consequence as it is purposeful and planned. Near the end of “The Worth of a Mountain,” Gregory McNamee explains how seemingly innocuous individual desires can threaten places of inestimable cultural and ecological value, such as the La Cienega Creek watershed.

Poet Jaswinder Bolina’s “Coda,” which concludes this volume, is a different spin on intentionality, stringing together text message responses to an inquiry about how to conclude a collection of poems. He reminds us that inspiration and creation radiate out from our lives in unforeseen ways. Similarly, Philip Hoare’s “Twenty-First Century Cetology” considers the exchange of influence, both historic and ongoing, between human and whale societies in the Pacific. The imaginative landscape architecture of Kathryn Foley and Colleen Tuite foresees the need for creating intentional new ecosystems in a dystopian future, including the fungus-harvesting lunar terrariums depicted on the cover, resulting in utilitarian and aesthetic constructions that blend stewardship, survival, and strange beauty.

The omnipresent challenge of environmental practice involves charting the ecological ripples our human activities create, where they cross, join, connect, oppose, harmonize. In “Practicing With Indra’s Net,” Stephanie Kaza helps us visualize the title concept from Mahayana Buddhist teaching, which describes the profundity of connections not only within the ecological processes that inspire our work, but also in our relationships with them and with each other. Kristen Przyborski’s “Between the Lines” considers the literal work of nets, as well as the limitations of scientific ways of knowing, from her time spent collecting and studying copepods in the Gulf of Mexico.

When the flight attendant announces our approach into Milwaukee, anticipation begins for the precise moment when we are once again permitted to turn on our cell phones and other handheld devices, to communicate in all of the novel ways we are beginning to take for granted. After selecting this volume’s theme, the editorial board and I discussed downplaying language that might lead to an overabundance of social-network-themed writing. Yet those omnipresent technologies not only played a crucial role in the process of assembling the issue, but also surprised us with creativity and subtlety when they did appear. In ten lines, Lisa Olstein’s “I Want To Save This Whale” juxtaposes online activism, in the form of a chain e-mail, with the very real and tangible endangered animal in question. At the Seeds of Solidarity Farm in Orange, Massachusetts, farmer Ricky Baruc composes non-electronic “blog posts” that are affixed to the farmstand’s produce refrigerator. In an age dazzled by inventions and innovations, these pieces remind us that how we communicate is tantamount to what we communicate.

On the ground driving northwest from Milwaukee, nearing the town of Horicon, Wisconsin, I have a strong urge to stop and visit the Horicon National Wildlife Refuge. This 22,000-acre marsh is a critical node of habitat, a crossroads for millions of birds migrating along the Mississippi Flyway every year. I think back to seven years ago, when my wife and I stood there on a wooden boardwalk on a frigid December day in the first few months of our life together, watching thousands of Canada geese flapping and honking en masse in an avian metropolis fringed by frozen cattails. I think of all of the connections we made in that one moment, to the place, to the birds, and to each other, that cannot be erased by time or distance, by wherever we’ve come from and wherever we’re headed.

Michael Metivier received a Master of Science degree in the Department of Environmental Studies at Antioch University New England, with a self-designed concentration in natural history and writing. A songwriter, poet, and essayist, Michael is fascinated by the influence of natural communities on creative culture.

• Benefits for newly forming Transition Town groups around Southern Vermont;
• For an international audience of peacebuilders at the SIT Graduate Institute;
• At a religious leader’s retreat in Connecticut;
• For global studies students at Newton South High School in Massachusetts;
• By teens at the Vermont Governor’s Institute on Current Issues & Youth Activism;
• Featured in a televised special on Brattleboro Community Television.

From a recent article about SOS in the Brattleboro Reformer*:

The title song opens with this poignant question about the impact of climate change on Vermont‘s landscape:  “Will it still feel like my home, when the leaves don’t turn to red and gold, and the ice doesn’t cover the fishin’ hole?”

Speaking about his reason for creating the Co-opera, Ungerleider says: “facing the over-whelming reality of global warming understandably causes fear, denial, and paralysis.  Music can help us manage the psychological challenges to initiating individual and collective action in response.” 

Rupa Cousins reflects on the power of this music to inspire, after seeing an earlier performance of the Co-opera: “I was taken by the passionate ride the musicians took us on: there were moments of sadness, but mostly moments that woke me up with real inspiration, fun, joy and possibility. It gave me the palpable desire to do something, some little or big thing I could do to lessen my impact on this dear planet.”

Dr. John Ungerleider is a professor of Peacebuilding & Conflict Transformation at SIT Graduate Institute in Vermont. He founded and directs international Youth Peacebuilding and Leadership Programs.

Bill Conley is an English teacher to speakers of other languages (TESOL) for students in schools around southern Vermont. He performs regionally as the guitar player for Jazzberry Jam.

Video: As performed at TEDxSIT and as featured on the Envirobeat blog

**For information or to order a CD of songs from the show: john.ungerleider@sit.edu

Communicating Science Weekend - Keene, New Hampshire
October 5-7, 2012

]]> http://wholeterrain.com/2012/08/amy_seidl/feed/ 0 http://wholeterrain.com/2012/08/tom-wessels/ http://wholeterrain.com/2012/08/tom-wessels/#comments Wed, 29 Aug 2012 03:07:28 +0000 Mike http://wholeterrain.com/?p=1123

We are excited to announce Tom Wessels as A keynote presenter at our upcoming Communicating Science weekend.  Tom, preeminent terrestrial ecologist and AUNE Environmental Studies faculty emeritus, has written several books including Reading the Forested Landscape: A Natural History of New England and The Myth of Progress: Toward a Sustainable Future.  His Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape was published this year.

Communicating Science Weekend
Keene, New Hampshire
October 5-7, 2012

]]> http://wholeterrain.com/2012/08/tom-wessels/feed/ 0 http://wholeterrain.com/2012/07/connecting-to-our-landscape-through-art-whole-terrain-interviews-erika-osborne/ http://wholeterrain.com/2012/07/connecting-to-our-landscape-through-art-whole-terrain-interviews-erika-osborne/#comments Sat, 14 Jul 2012 17:36:31 +0000 cailanthus http://wholeterrain.com/?p=1036 by Caroline Ailanthus

Note; this is an updated version of the 2010 profile written by Hannah Wheeler

Environmental artist Erika Osborne is a self-described daughter of the desert, and in many ways her art remains rooted in the arid mountain west, like the scrawny, twisted junipers and pinion pines she has so carefully drawn.

“Because there aren’t a lot of trees, you notice individuals,” she said. “They have this character to them that’s a product of the environment and the weather. I started looking at them as individuals and making portraits of them.”

Her “Tree Drawings” series is a careful, graphite record of those characters. Each detailed portrait required her to be outdoors in the southwestern wilderness for as much as 12 hours. It was only by sitting with the trees for hours on end as the drawing grew from one sheet of paper onto the next that she began to understand how each tree responded to its particular place. The way the sun moved across a pinion pine explained the shape the tree had favored. Sharing a windstorm with an old and twisted juniper, she learned the reason for its wild, gnarled limbs.

And yet, for four years now, Osborne has made her home in the green and humid southern Appalachians as an art professor at West Virginia University.

“I left New Mexico because I felt it was time to move on with my career,” Osborne explains. “As an artist I have always been interested in how people connect to their environment – that is to say, how nature affects culture and conversely, how culture affects nature. By doing a 180-degree turn and moving from the desert southwest to the green (almost tropical) mountains of West Virginia I was starkly confronted with a disparate connection to place.”

West Virginia is a place of incredible beauty and rich biodiversity, yet it is also the setting of horrific mountaintop removal mining and fracking.

“It’s taken me a few years to figure out how to address this dichotomy as an artist, and to be honest, I’m not sure I’m there yet. But, after having immersed myself in the culture and issues over the course of the last few years, I feel I know enough to begin to address it in an honest and intelligent way. I am currently working on the initial research and data collection for a body of work I will be doing on MTR mining. We’ll see how it goes!”

It is through her position as an art professor at West Virginia University that she helps students, and herself, connect to, and come to terms with Appalachia.

“I believe in place-based education and getting [students] out of the box that is the studio or the classroom. Choosing to go to school in West Virginia is very different from choosing to go to school in, say, New York. Students should take advantage of that difference and cultivate it,” she said.

Osborne’s students focus on topics of inquiry such as earth and sky, people and place, and sustainability. This type of study “creates community and gets people engaged. Students often go back to places and do more work and continue their research,” Osborne said.

In one class, a local watershed group helps students tour the watershed, learn the area’s coal mining history, and understand its water quality issues. Students then create site-specific art projects in the watershed. In another class, students further investigate mountain-top-removal issues by visiting coal mining sites and speaking with community members and environmental activists.

Osborne has often taken an interdisciplinary approach, collaborating with scientists to raise awareness of environmental issues. Back in the southwest, she spent time at the Laboratory of Tree Ring Research in Arizona, where she worked with scientists and used wood samples and logging research to complete her “Wood Work” series.

“I wanted to be detailed and spend a lot of time investigating and drawing every ring. I wanted to pay homage to the ecology and individuality of the trees while acknowledging the economy of them, to wood as a product that we use,” she said.

Osborne compares tree rings to a topographic map, another interest of hers. In her “Mapping Bodily Connection” series, she paints portions of topographic maps across people’s backs.

In September, all of these various bodies of work and more will be out on display in one venue or another, certainly an exciting thing for any artist to be able to say. She has even graced the pages of Whole Terrain; her visual essay, “Rites of Passage, Manti La Sal Spruce Beetle Detection I” appears in the current volume, “Boundaries.”

Osborne is also spearheading a new interdisciplinary visual arts initiative that she and her colleagues are calling “the School of Art and Design at West Virginia University’s Global Positioning Studies, or GPS Program. This umbrella program will house my field-based programs along with those of my colleagues.”

But the most exciting news of all has to be the birth of a little girl, in March of 2011, whom Osborne calls “a true source of inspiration in my life.” Osborne, this daughter of the desert, has named her own daughter Sonora.

And yes, she does go back sometimes, traveling “back and forth, to stay rooted in both places. For that I’m grateful, I don’t know many people who get to call two places home!”

Erika Osborne received her BFA from the University of Utah in painting and drawing and her MFA from the University of New Mexico. Erika’s artwork deals directly with cultural connections to place and environment. She is now an Associate Professor in the Division of Art and Design at West Virginia University.