Check out the new Writing Nature site, which is being developed in affiliation with over 150 writers, painters, photographers, musicians and other artists in the Writing Nature community. Their work explores and promotes sense of place and environmental themes. Individuals in the Writing Nature community have created long-running annual and semi-annual retreats at Camp Glen Brook in Marlborough NH, the Baca Campus in Crestone CO and the Blue River gathering at Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene OR. They also publish an annual journal entitled ‘Writing Nature’ and have worked collaboratively with a number of organizations such as the Rocky Mountain Land Library, the Natural History Network, and Orion Society as well as Whole Terrain.
The initial feature on the site, the Writing Nature Marketplace has been created to help promote the works of members and affiliate organizations of the network through consignment sales. Volumes of Whole Terrainare now available through the Marketplace.
Julia Shipley grows 50 percent of her diet in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. Photo by Hanna Wheeler
If chores were a car trip, instead of a process from one end of the barn to another, from full udder to empty, we’d be in Montreal by the time the milked cows were let out to pasture, the machines were rinsed, and the last toss of sawdust sighed to the clean barn floor. It’s dark when we start, but light by the end, as if milking made the morning. –excerpt from the poem “A Process” by Julia Shipley
Julia Shipley is a farmer and a writer in the small community of Craftsbury in Vermont’s Northeast Kingdom. “Process” is a featured theme in her writing as well as in her life. Leaving suburban Philadelphia to apprentice on farms and then buy her own farm was a process. Earning her MFA in Creative Writing and Literature and then really honing her writing craft at the Vermont Studio and publishing her work was a process. Through these processes, she realized her twin dreams and became part of a long legacy of writer-farmers in Vermont.
Shipley says there is a connection between her two crafts. “I find there’s a reciprocity. In some ways, the discipline of farming has taught me the discipline of writing.”
She says jotting down ideas in her journal is like planting seeds. Selecting some of those ideas for a fuller piece is like transplanting the healthiest seedlings. She nurtures, weeds and prunes her writing and her crops. The final product is something she can share, a pesto or a poem.
Spending all day only writing at a computer or all day only performing repetitive farm tasks can be “tedious,” Shipley said. “I need both.”
She lives in the right place for doing both. Shipley says that Vermont has more writers and more farmers per capita than any other state. Her article about Vermont’s farmer-writer legacy is featured in the latest issue of Vermont’s Local Banquet.
Some of those Vermont farmer-writers include Helen and Scott Nearing, Elliott Merrick and, of course, Robert Frost. A common theme in all of their work includes celebration of rural living, simplicity, and connection to the land. “We could use that advice today,” said Shipley. “It’s not obsolete.”
Julia Shipley reads from her chapbook, Herd. Photo courtesy writingonthefarm.com
Shipley sees her dual lifestyle as an almost patriotic duty. “The Jeffersonian Ideal is somebody who is both a farmer and a writer,” said Shipley. “President Jefferson had this belief that this country should be filled with gentlemen farmers, with people who are learned, who are using their intellects for democracy… but also using their muscles and their bodies to produce their food and have a connection to land.”
Shipley has served as the Director of Writing Studies and Faculty in Sustainable Agriculture at Sterling College, where the motto is Working hands, Working minds. Now she is a newspaper columnist and a freelance writer. Her chapbook, Herd, was published by Sheltering Pines Press and her poems and essays have been published in Alimentum,Hunger Mountain, Small Farmers Journal, Vermont Life, Vermont’s Local Banquet and Whole Terrain. She runs a writer’s retreat and facilitates writing workshops for elementary students and elders.
Much of Shipley’s writing takes the form of “braided essays.” When asked about the term, Shipley grabbed one of the ubiquitous pieces of twine in the barn to demonstrate. She teased apart a frayed end to show that rope is really a bunch of individual strands that form something new. Like rope, her life and her writing braid together things that one might not normally connect.
“I started writing essays that bring disparate things together,” she said. “A braided essay does the work of mending divisions that we’ve become used to between this and that. It does a little of repair work like this twine does. Akin to the life I’m trying to build,” she said.
Shipley farms six acres of fruits and vegetables. Usually, she also has sheep, dairy cows, and poultry, though this season she’s livestock-free due to some fencing improvements she has to make. Shipley said her goal isn’t to make all of her income from farming alone, but to grow at least 50 percent of her diet.
Even though she’s following in the shoes of Vermont’s farmer-writers, her own farming looks a little different. Before she had land of her own, she had to improvise. Her desire to farm became something of a town effort. In the parking lot for her apartment building, she turned a child’s playhouse into a chicken coop. She raised vegetables behind the coffee shop, raised milk calves behind the doctor’s office, grew potatoes at the studio. “What’s so beautiful about Vermont is the community really catches you,” she said.
Finally, she found property of her own. She compares her farm to a story, saying, “We’re just out of the first chapter.” In it, there are different characters including “not just human neighbors but animal neighbors” and a fantastical setting including a river that “swerves like a drunk through this town.”
Her farm is also a story of a barter system that is alive and well in Vermont. “I think smaller, more agricultural towns are apt to have the wherewithal to barter,” said Shipley. For example, she worked on a friend’s farm in return for two milk calves. She raised them up, then traded one of the cows in return for a year’s supply of hay for the other cow. And so on.
Everywhere Shipley looks, she finds connections between writing and farming. Even the alphabet shows a connection between the two. She says writing and agriculture came about around the same time since farmers needed to a way track their new abundance. If you tip over the letter A, it looks like a bovine face with two horns. This is how the first letter of the ancient Semetic alphabet was written and it gave rise to the upright Greek letter A we use in the English language. “Aleph is for ox. Bet is house. Aleph bet. Alphabet. You’ve got an ox house! These disciplines are not so far apart,” said Shipley.
In fact, for Shipley, the disciplines are interwoven. It all comes back to process. “When you make something with your hands, when you bring chaos into some deliberate order, an internal process is happening at the same time,” she said.
Julia Shipley is a 2010-11 Vermont Arts Council Creation Grant recipient, completing a manuscript of braided essays about small scale agriculture. As both a professional writer and subsistence farmer she’s interested in the overlap and interplay between these two fields. Read more here.
(This is Part 3 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 2 here.)
Part 3: On Sustainability
Photo courtesy Dr. Cameron Wake
Dr. Cameron Wake has been heavily influenced and inspired by the University of New Hampshire’s chief sustainability officer, Tom Kelly, who leads the university’s sustainability programs. Started in 1997, the UNH sustainability program was first endowed university office of its kind in the U.S. Kelly’s multi-faceted approach to sustainability—applications in teaching, research, campus culture, operations and extension—resembles an outline for systemic change.
“It’s not about incremental change,” said Wake. “We need transformational change in the way we deal with climate, the way we deal with ecosystems and biodiversity, the way we deal with food and agriculture and the way we deal with society.”
Wake said that working with Kelly opened his eyes to why good science is important but not enough. “There’s a whole education, outreach and engagement effort that’s [also] important.”
Wake thinks that sustainability must be place-based in order for it to be truly successful. For example, the way New England defines and achieves sustainability may be different from what sustainability means to someone from the southwest.
Cameron Wake and others discuss climate change and solutions on GreenScreen.tv
“Trying to solve this problem with a cookie-cutter approach from Washington makes no sense,” Wake said. “Washington might want to do something like big cap and trade to reduce carbon emissions. . .but then how we actually figure out how to reduce our emissions, or how we adapt to more flooding or heat waves?”
“This needs to be done on a regional to local scale. The solutions are not going to be global, the solutions are going to be where people live.” Similar to the coalition of six Kansan towns, sustainability manifests most effectively when it is approached as a matter of shared goals and culture.
Wake attributes an aspect of his success to his ability to collaborate, something else he said he learned from his childhood mountaineering adventure. “It was daunting,” Wake said. “They took us from this unskilled, unknowledgeable group of kids who didn’t know each other, and by the end of the month we had climbed mountains together, we had saved each others lives, we had worked as a team, we developed all of these skills. . .We relied on each other.”
It may be just that sort of ardent collaboration–partially kindled by the dangerous terrain of icy mountains–that is required of communities in order to implement the systemic changes that Wake and his colleagues dream of and encourage.
If you gave a 250 acre farm over to a group of writers, artists, actors, musicians and filmmakers for three days, you might well get anarchy. Or you’d get an amazing festival…
September 16-18
Glen Brook’s annual Monadnock Literary & Arts Festival invites writers, artists, musicians – and participants – to celebrate the effects of place on our daily lives. Whether we live in city neighborhoods, the suburbs or exurbs, or rural landscape, our environment affects who we are: our choice of music and entertainment, our outdoor adventures and our culinary tastes, even the friends we choose. Artists and writers and visitors are invited to Glen Brook’s Marlborough, New Hampshire, campus to celebrate three days of the arts – writer discussions and readings, artist presentations, and musical performances.
This year’s writers include Alexandra Zissu, author of Planet Home and contributor to The New York Times, New Hampshire humorist Rebecca Rule, Christian McEwen, author of Wolrd Enough and Time, Rick Carey, author of Our Own Version of Iowa–and many others. Musical performances include Peter Siegel, Erica Wheeler, and New Hampshire’s own Lunch at the Dump! Featured artists include Wolf Kahn and several others. Join us for a two-day celebration of the arts!
(This is Part 2 of a three-part series on climatologist, Dr. Cameron Wake. Read Part 1 here.)
Dr. Cameron Wake. Photo courtesy UNH
Part 2: The Ice Cores of Research
Dr. Cameron Wake’s research started with the analysis of ice cores from the Himalayas and the Tibetan Plateau and evolved to include cores from Arctic glaciers. He studied the composition of water and amount of dust that existed in the layers of the glaciers formed over thousands of years ago. He said that this research led to three at first seemingly uninteresting discoveries that added up.
The first of such was that his team’s research defined “the spatial and temporal variation of precipitation chemistry in central Asia.” Wake explained that the study of ice cores is the study of changes over time, but central to the understanding of what those changes over time mean is the understanding of how the basic chemistry of precipitation varies over space and time.
The analysis of the change over time of precipitation chemistry led to the second significant result of Wake’s research in the Arctic: the development of a relationship between changes in ice core chemistry and changes in summertime sea ice extent. Lastly, his team tracked changes over time of various pollutant deposition in the ice.
During this exploration and research, a new batch of ice core scientists were educated by working on these research projects.
“Our understanding of the way climate has changed over thousands to millions of years does not come from studying meteorological records, because reliable records only extend back a few hundred years at best,” said Wake. “Rather, our understanding of climate changes in the past comes from paleoclimate records developed from the study of ice cores, tree rings, sediments, cave deposits, rocks and other natural archives.”
“[The paleoclimate record] has provided me with a perspective that allows me to say with confidence that humans have now become a major geological force capable of changing the climate system,” he said.
Climatology… on ice! Cameron Wake, Researcher and Professor at the University of New Hampshire, is passionate about ice. He plays on it and he works on it. Hockey and ice cores shows Cam how ice is part of the fabric of life in northern New England. And the ice itself has a story to tell. For over 100 years the ice has told of the effects of climate change by marking the day of its departure from lakes in the region. And as that date gets earlier and earlier over the passing decades the ice tells the story of a warming world, even in spite of winters with snow to spare.
The Crevasse of Denial
With a 2011 Gallup poll showing only 50 percent of respondents concerned about climate change, there seems to be an obvious rift between the climate science that Wake studies and public understanding or opinion on climate change risks.
Wake pegs part of such climate change denial on citizen inclination towards certain beliefs, such as whether or not the government should interfere with business or with individual decisions. He said that climate change denial advertising campaigns paid for by Exxon/Mobile and big coal companies appeal to individuals who are predisposed against government intervention.
“It’s not really about rational thought,” said Wake, “It’s about ‘Who do you trust?’ and ‘Where do you get your news from?’ This notion that everybody is going to weigh the scientific evidence equally is garbage. That’s a world where everybody thinks rationally, and we live in a world where many individuals do no think rationally.”
He says he grapples with climate change denial a lot because it has a big impact on how climate scientists, ecologists and environmentalists go about solving the problem.
“I think for 20 years scientists have basically said, ‘Hey look, we just need to do good science and public policy will follow,’ and in fact, that’s not the case,” said Wake.
Although the rift between both public policy and opinion and what translates as a climate crisis in the data of climate science is a tough bridge to gap, Wake has made the bridging of that gap a recent focus. “My goal is to find out how it is that we engage with the rest of society, where they are, not where I am,” he said. “We need to say, ‘Where is it that you’re at that we can talk about this issue and meet on some common ground?’”
He references an October 2010 article in The New York Times about six towns in Kansas focusing on decreasing energy usage for the sake of moral obligation, energy independence and economic prosperity rather than climate change. “That’s the next step,” said Wake, “to figure out how is it that we get people to engage in this issues. Because it is so sad that it’s a political issue. It shouldn’t be.”
Wake does his best to take part in this engagement through a variety of means. He talks at dozens of events each year to share the results of his research with the general public and has written a series of reports on climate change for a broader audience. He also served on the governor-appointed NH Climate Change Policy Task Force that wrote the climate action plan for the state and he currently serves on the NH Energy and Climate Collaborative, a group that seeks to facilitate and track progress towards implementation of the climate action plan.
Check out the new Writing Nature site, which is being developed in affiliation with over 150 writers, painters, photographers, musicians and other artists in the Writing Nature community. Their work explores and promotes sense of place and environmental themes. Individuals in the Writing Nature community have created long-running annual and semi-annual retreats at Camp Glen Brook in Marlborough NH, the Baca Campus in Crestone CO and the Blue River gathering at Andrews Experimental Forest east of Eugene OR. They also publish an annual journal entitled ‘Writing Nature’ and have worked collaboratively with a number of organizations such as the Rocky Mountain Land Library, the Natural History Network, and Orion Society as well as Whole Terrain.
