Beacon Broadside

Connecting With Nature on Earth Day and Every Day

In honor of Earth Day, we asked a handful of our nature writers: "What is one thing that people should do to connect with nature? Why is it important?" Here are their responses. Read, enjoy, and GET OUTSIDE!

 

CHRISTINE BYL, author of Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods

Go outside. Be outside. It sounds obvious, I know, but it's amazing how easy it is to forget this. In the noble but often all-consuming quest to make sustainable choices and fight big environmental battles and visit spectacular places, daily time spent present in the outdoors—skiing, walking the dog, splitting wood, just watching—is the most grounding thing I know of. It not only hitches me to the details and inhabitants of my own place, it reminds me that I am nature. Not separate from it. As reliant on my ecosystem—no matter how fragile or fractured—as a chickadee, a birch tree, a moose. For me, this realization is the most important thing: the world is my home.

 

BRAD TYER, author of Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

The best way I know to connect with nature, sullied and otherwise, is to spend a week descending a river in a canoe. Why a river? Because water is the root of all biology, and gravity is its only motor. Why a week? Experienced paddlers agree that it takes at least three days to leave day-to-day time-clocked headspace behind and enter "river time," leaving at least three days of circadian gravy. Why is it important? You can tell me when you get back.

 

EVA SAULITIS, author of Into Great Silence: A Memoir of Discovery and Loss among Vanishing Orcas

So many things come to mind with this question, the biggest one being: Go outside. Alone. Spend time alone in nature. But something even more important, I think, is to come to know well one wild creature that lives where you do. Today, after cleaning my teeth, the dental hygienist showed me a photo she'd taken and posted on her Facebook page. It was a photo of a coyote with a dead snowshoe hare in its jaws that she took near her house. The big white feet of the hare looked longer than the coyote's face. The coyote's coat was thick and luxurious. She told me she'd seen lots of showshoe hare tracks in the snow on her walks, but that was the first hare she'd seen in a while. She told me she'd dreamed once of being a wildlife biologist. But in a way, she is. She is a citizen biologist. Because she knows these creatures intimately, knows their habits, she couldn't stand by if something threatened them. I believe she'd act. So my advice for Earth Day is to come to know a species of wild creature that shares your habitat, even if it's just a house sparrow. Or a flock of crows. Or a family of raccoons. Or monarch butterflies. Or a spider. Consider it a neighbor, not just another animal. When you encounter this animal on your walks outside (alone as often as you can) say hello, even if it's just a whisper, or a voice in your head.

 

MICHAEL LANZA, author of Before They're Gone: A Family's Year-Long Quest to Explore America's Most Endangered National Parks

It may be a sad and telling measure of our disconnection from nature that we even feel the need to contemplate the question, “What is one thing that people should do to connect with nature, and why is it important?” It implies that the objective is difficult to achieve, requires time and effort, and one can only attain this level of connectedness through methodical planning and perhaps a good self-help book. It’s not, it doesn’t, and you don’t really need anything more than a doorway to a natural environment.

A regular fix of nature doesn’t have to be complicated or time-consuming. One deep irony being an outdoor writer who works at home is that I can go an entire day literally without stepping outside once. It’s easy, in fact, to get lost in what I’m working on and suddenly realize, at the end of the day, that I have no idea whether it’s warm or cold outside, sunny, windy, or snowing. Then I know what I have to do: walk out into my back yard.

I take nothing—especially not my phone. I have two trees and a garden and it’s mostly quiet back there except for the birds flitting between my trees. I see the colors of flowers and drink in a big visual gulp of green. In an adequate dose, green can solve any problem; I’m convinced of that. And I just stand out there, doing nothing except listening and watching—feeling the sun’s warmth, the breeze on my arms. My blood pressure takes a nice, healthful dip and levels off. I’m pretty sure it does, anyway, based on the instantaneous sense of relaxation I gain just by stepping out there.

Often, I only spend ten minutes in my yard—not a very deep commitment to connecting with nature on a given day, I admit. But there’s a huge ROI in psychological and emotional gains for the insignificant time and effort invested. I’m no health professional or psychologist, but I will confidently predict that if you carve out ten minutes in every workday to stand under trees and listen to birds singing, you will live longer, raise smarter children, develop amazing abs, enjoy a more vigorous sex life, and smile more often. Or at least the last thing.

I need and regularly get more than ten minutes a day outside (in a good week, all day, every day). You should, too. Leave home for a day or a week and go someplace off the grid. Hike a mountain, paddle a river, climb a cliff, sit by a lake, fish a stream. We evolved to live in the natural world and we starve ourselves physically and emotionally when we divorce ourselves from it.

But in the interim, those ten minutes under a tree—now that’s the ticket.

 

Watch our YouTube playlist of videos for Earth Day

 

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Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

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Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape

A memoir-meets-exposé that examines our fraught relationship with the West and our attempts to clean up a toxic environmental legacy

In 2002, Texas journalist Brad Tyer strapped a canoe on his truck and moved to Montana, a state that has long exerted a mythic pull on America's imagination as an unspoiled landscape. The son of an engineer who reclaimed wastewater, Tyer was looking for a pristine river to call his own. What he found instead was a century's worth of industrial poison clotting the Clark Fork River, a decades-long engineering project to clean it up, and a forgotten town named Opportunity.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Montana exploited the richest copper deposits in the world, fueling the electric growth of twentieth-century America and building some of the nation's most outlandish fortunes. The toxic byproduct of those fortunes-what didn't spill into the river-was dumped in Opportunity.

In the twenty-first century, Montana's draw is no longer metal, but landscape: the blue-ribbon trout streams and unspoiled wilderness of the nation's "last best place." To match reality to the myth, affluent exurbanites and well-meaning environmentalists are trying to restore the Clark Fork River to its "natural state." In the process, millions of tons of toxic soils are being removed and dumped-once again-in Opportunity. As Tyer investigates Opportunity's history, he wrestles with questions of environmental justice and the ethics of burdening one community with an entire region's waste.

Stalled at the intersection of a fading extractive economy and a fledgling restoration boom, Opportunity's story is a secret history of the American Dream, and a key to understanding the country's-and increasingly the globe's-demand for modern convenience.

As Tyer explores the degradations of the landscape, he also probes the parallel emotional geography of familial estrangement. Part personal history and part reportorial narrative, Opportunity, Montanais a story of progress and its price, of copper and water, of father and son, and of our attempts to redeem the mistakes of the past. 

Author Website | Watch the book trailer on YouTube | Read Chapter 1 on Scribd | How to buy

 

Buy Opportunity, Montana at Beacon.org | Amazon | Barnes and Noble | Indiebound

About the Author

Brad Tyer is the managing editor of The Texas Observer in Austin. His writing has appeared in Outside, High Country News, the New York Times Book Review, the Houston Chronicle, the Drake, Texas Monthly, No Depression, and the Dallas Morning News. He's been awarded a Knight-Wallace Fellowship, a Fund for Investigative Journalism grant, and a Fishtrap writing residency. 

Visit Brad Tyer's website.

Follow Brad Tyer on Twitter.

 

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Recommended Reading for World Water Day

Today is World Water Day. Observed every March 22nd, World Water Day reminds people around the globe about the importance of freshwater and urges them to advocate for the sustainable use of freshwater resources.

This year’s theme is water cooperation, a rallying cry to recognize water as a resource that we are all entitled to and for which management responsibility is shared. On the surface, coming together as a global community for the good of water sustainability seems simple. But freshwater is becoming a scarce resource—one that is not evenly distributed around the world. And, with climate change shifting growing seasons and sea levels, our understanding of water’s boundaries and availabily is becoming even more muddled. To ensure a viable future, water must be a shared, not bought and sold to the highest bidder, not polluted and ignored at the detriment of our communities.

In addition to the small steps towards water conservation that people can take each day, World Water Day asks us to look toward the future, understand the realities of the water crisis that we as a planet are facing, and take steps to change it.

At Beacon Press, we have published a number of books over the last decade that explore water usage and sustainability concerns from a variety of perspectives. Below are six titles that focus on the many ways access to water affects our lives, and uncover how the lack of collaboration by individuals, corporations, and government agencies has put us on a perilous path towards international water shortages.

World Water Day Reading

                        

Blue Revolution: Unmaking America’s Water Crisis by Cynthia Barnett

The first book to call for a national water ethic, Blue Revolution is a powerful meditation on water and community in America. The book combines investigative reporting with solutions from around the globe to show how local communities and entire nations can come together to stretch vanishing water supplies and protect themselves from increasingly devastating floods. Barnett challenges the conventional wisdom that the United States can build its way out of water crisis and argues that no solution would be more powerful than an ethic for water—embraced not only by citizens, but by government and major water users including the energy and agricultural sectors.

Read chapter one, "The Illusion of Water Abundance;" view five principles for developing a water ethic in your community.

Opportunity, Montana: Big Copper, Bad Water, and the Burial of an American Landscape by Brad Tyer 

Journalist Brad Tyer moved to Montana looking for big skies, clear waters, and change of scenery. But, soon after he arrived he discovered that “the treasure state” had buried secrets. Opportunity, Montana explores how a century of copper mining devastated the Clark Fork River, which runs through the state of Montana, as it took on the bulk of the pollutants and industrial waste. In the 1980s the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) designated the river as a Superfund site in need of environmental clean-up—one of seventeen in the state. It took twenty years for the EPA and the responsible parties to agree on what to do about it, and another ten before any change would be seen. How do you fix a broken river, Tyer asks? The financial implications, estimated to be 1.3 billion dollars, were just the beginning. First, 400 acres of toxic sediment had to be dug up and disposed of, and as Tyer discovered, mining waste doesn’t go away, it just gets moved and covered up. For the second time in Montana’s copper history, that burden would fall on the small town of Opportunity.

Read a selection from part one, "Headwater;" watch the book trailer.

Recovering a Lost River: Removing Dams, Rewilding Salmon, Revitalizing Communities by Steven Hawley

In the last decade, the inventory of dams in the United States has been reduced by nearly 500. Though many of those have been small, privately-owned ventures, the positive impact has led to proposals for larger dam removal projects nationally. In Recovering A Lost River, Hawley advocates for the removal of dams and the restoration of the rich and thriving environments that can be found in and around free flowing water. Assessing the current state of freshwater ecosystems nationally, he reports that a third of freshwater species are threatened or endangered, forty percent of freshwater bodies in America are too polluted for swimming or fishing, and half of the nation’s wetlands are gone. This book is a call to action for overcoming corporate and federal obstacles in order to restore free flowing waterways and reinvigorate long suffering wildernesses.

Read chapter eight, "The Fifth H."

When the Rivers Run Dry: Water—The Defining Crisis of the Twenty-first Century and The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

In 2007, When the Rivers Run Dry was a groundbreaking exploration on the state of water sources around the world, and the looming possibility of a world-wide water shortage. It is now considered to be required reading for anyone looking to understand the water crisis.

In 2012, Fred Pearce revisited the issue of water sustainability in The Land Grabbers, exploring how the need for abundant water in industrial agriculture has resulted in wealthy countries and powerful corporations in need of water seeking to obtain it, while impoverished countries with access to water are looking to profit from it. These practices have led to the exploitation of vulnerable land, people, and water, with the potential for devastating consequences.

Read the introduction to The Land Grabbers; view the land grabbing map.

The Springs of Namje: A Ten-Year Journal from the Villages of Nepal to the Halls of Congress by Rajeev Goyal

In 2001, at the age of twenty-two, Rajeev Goyal joined the Peace Corps. Assigned to teach English in Nepal, he found himself in the remote mountain town of Namje where villagers spend most of their day walking to and from a far-off stream to fetch water. Goyal sets out to create a water project that would pump water directly into the town, in hopes of improving every part of village life, from health and prosperity to education. With the support and dedication of the villagers, the mission is successful, but the long-term consequences of development go beyond anything Goyal could have imagined. The Springs of Namje explores how water can hold back or propel a community forward.

Read chapter two, "Baitadi on Fire."

---

Written by Caitlin Meyer, senior publicist at Beacon Press.

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150 Years After Thoreau: Christine Byl and Brad Tyer

May 6 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Henry David Thoreau, the father of American nature writing. His influence on contemporary environmental writing is still very significant, and this weekend, we're highlighting that influence on our blog. Today, we hear from Christine Byl and Brad Tyer, two forthcoming Beacon authors. 

Christine Byl is the author of Dirt Work, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. She lives in a yurt outside of Healy, Alaska with her husband and retired sled dogs. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Crazyhorse, The Sun, Glimmer Train,Broadsided Press, Lumberyard, and others. She worked on trail crews on public lands for 15 years; with her husband she now runs a family business doing trail design and construction.

I had not split firewood or hoed a row of beans when I first read Thoreau in high school English. I lived in urban Michigan, had no experience with subsistence tasks. Yet I loved Thoreau from the first page. Now I live in Interior Alaska, off-the-grid without running water, and daily chores take up much of my time (picking berries, hauling water, cutting wood). But the reasons I was drawn to Thoreau in high school remain consistent now: something about what centered him made sense to me—life connected to a place you lived, and what you did there. I liked how he was humble yet sure of himself. I liked that he admired squirrels.

As a writer, I've respected other things. His cultural critique feels germane 150 years out. He's a dialectical thinker, finding fertile ground between assumed dichotomies. He summons a childlike wonder at the world. He reminds me to laugh, to take words and ideas seriously, but myself less so. Simply put, Thoreau writes with mind, heart and body fully engaged. Among the many writers who've influenced me, Thoreau may best embody Henry James’ famous quote: "A writer is someone on whom nothing is lost."

The conventional way to write off Thoreau is on his so-called inconsistencies (Walden wasn't wild, it was a mile from Concord!), but Thoreau's wisdom is that he never claimed a deliberate life had to happen in the middle of nowhere. An authentic life isn't an escape: it has less to do with location than attentiveness to it.

Despite the solitude he was best known for, I think Thoreau would make good company. (I feel so friendly toward him that I refer to him in my mind by the pet nickname, HDT.) I can imagine working in the woods with him, tossing 8-foot logs into the truckbed, making him blush at a bawdy joke. After, in the cool spring evening I'd pour us hot cocoa (mine with whiskey, his without.) I can see myself leaning on the axe near the splitting stump while HDT quotes himself from Walden, "Every man looks at his wood-pile with a kind of affection." Yep, HDT, and every woman, too.

 

Brad Tyer is the author of Opportunity Montana, forthcoming from Beacon Press in 2013. He is a journalist whose work has appeared in Outside magazine, High Country News, the Texas Observer, and many other newspapers and magazines.

I grew up the child of a first-generation middle-class family for whom a motorboat and a weekend place on a lake defined the lap of suburban luxury. My parents were just a generation removed from fishing for food and rural isolation as facts of life; to transform those memories of need into leisure marked their triumph over circumstance. They’d escaped. To prove it, they bought a place to escape to.

I’d never heard of Thoreau, but it was our Walden. Like Henry’s cabin, adjusted for interstates and dams, it was just north of town (Houston) on a reservoir (Lake Conroe). Curb to gate, we could drive there from home on the other side of the city in about as long as it took HDT to walk into Concord and bum a beer from Emerson. We called our place Hard Times, with the reflexive self-deprecation of insecure East Texas arrivistes.

At the other end of Lake Conroe was the only Walden I knew of: a lakefront development of condos clustered around a marina full of boats at the western end of what had once been the San Jacinto River. Walden had a golf course and tennis courts. Walden had a shop on a pier selling gasoline and life jackets and bait and polo shirts embroidered with the resort logo. Walden was the rich end of the lake.

It was years before I read Thoreau’s Walden and understood the references and aspirations playing out at the rich end of the lake—and, acknowledged or not, at our end too.

What I remember of Walden is the occasional diamond clarity of its sentences, and Thoreau’s constitutional contrariness. I don’t remember his celebrations of nature so much as his condemnations of so-called civilization. 

To realize that developers were repackaging that contrary clarity as a hive of internal combustion, on a time-share basis no less, marked maybe my first real awareness, in retrospect, of the ways of the commercial world. They’d take a word that meant something—Walden—and turn it upside down. They’d try to fool you. They’d advertise one thing and sell you another. Your parents could do the same thing: Hard Times my ass...

Words can serve truth, or they can serve their speakers. That’s an awareness—call it a bias; fair enough—that I’ve carried through 20 years of journalism aimed, when I could see, at clarifying that which has been obfuscated. It’s a bias that informs Opportunity, Montana pretty deeply. As influences go, it’s indirect, but that’s the note Thoreau sings for me.