Beacon Broadside

Beacon Buzz: How “Snob Zones” keep out affordable housing

Notable Mentions

Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate by Lisa Prevost

Lisa Prevost discussed "How Zoning Affects the Wealth Gap" with David Brancaccio on NPR's Marketplace Morning Report. 

“For a housing market, it’s always healthy to have a range of housing so that people can move up the ladder,” she says. “I grew up in New Hampshire and I remember when the small towns did have the bank president living the same place where the farm laborers did. We have lost a lot of that through suburbanization and as we see the deepening inequities between incomes, I think that’s reinforced by some of this zoning.” [Listen]

 

Write up on Connecticut Magazine’s blog

In four of the six New England states (excluding Maine and New Hampshire), the recent national "housing bust" hasn't reduced home prices enough to make the median-priced home affordable for the average household. According to the National Association of Realtors, only 25 percent of Americans want a home on an oversized lot, yet that type of housing accounts for 43 percent of the supply in New England. [Read the rest]

 

The Point, on Cape Cod’s NPR station, did a segment on narrative non-fiction with their host, a local librarian, and the Cape Cod Times book editor. They mention both Snob Zones and Dirt Work starting around the 24 minute mark. [Listen] Which leads us to...

 

 

Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods by Christine Byl 

National Parks Traveler review:

In her book, Ms. Byl recalls long days of clearing brush, digging ditches, building bridges, cleaning up after forest fires, and blasting snow. She learned how to use such unfamiliar tools as crosscut saws, pulaskis, and chainsaws. She grew accustomed to dealing with the harsh living conditions and injuries that are part of the job.

And, frankly, she learned how to cope in the backcountry, miles from the nearest restroom. Yes, Ms. Byl is not afraid to talk about "dropping her pants in the woods."

 

Listen to Christine Byl on Alaska Public Radio’s Talk of Alaska talking about her tools, her life in the woods, wildlife, and more. Especially great to hear her reading her meditation on the lynx. 

 

Take a quick look at what Christine carries in her backpack in this YouTube video:

 

 

Light Without Fire: The Making of America's First Muslim College by Scott Korb

Reviewed on Caffeinated Muslim 

Excerpt on Religion & Politics

 

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

Review from the Billings Gazette: “an engaging, almost breathtaking bit of nonfiction.” 

 

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

Fred Pearce was interviewed about The Land Grabbers for New Hampshire Public Radio’s Word Of Mouth

 

The Most Expensive Game in Town: The Rising Cost of Youth Sports and the Toll on Today's Families by Mark Hyman

Dave Zirin heaps praise on Mark Hyman and The Most Expensive Game in Town on his blog for The Nation.

  

 

Notable Mentions

Hunting Season: A Story of Home, Immigration, and Murder by Mirta Ojito (November)

"An account that is as unflinching as it is important.  Both an incisive reconstruction of a heartbreaking murder and an unsparing diagnosis of a national malady  . . . with HUNTING SEASON Ojito has done truth an invaluable service. Extraordinary." —Junot Díaz, Pulitzer Prize winning author of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

 

Being Both: Embracing Two Religions in One Interfaith Family by Susan Katz Miller (October)

A moving, personal story that opens new dimensions of life in general and religious life in particular that rise out of an interfaith family. Susan Katz Miller writes with the passion of experience and with the integrity of being authentic. Its insights moved me deeply.”—John Shelby Spong, author of The Fourth Gospel: Tales of a Jewish Mystic

Related articles

Connecting With Nature on Earth Day and Every Day

Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods

Snob Zones: Fear, Prejudice, and Real Estate

John K. Ross on Zoning

Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods

A lively and lyrical account of one woman's unlikely apprenticeship on a national-park trail crew and what she discovers about nature, gender, and the value of hard work

Christine Byl first encountered the national parks the way most of us do: on vacation. But after she graduated from college, broke and ready for a new challenge, she joined a Glacier National Park trail crew as a seasonal "traildog" maintaining mountain trails for the millions of visitors Glacier draws every year. Byl first thought of the job as a paycheck, a summer diversion, a welcome break from "the real world" before going on to graduate school. She came to find out that work in the woods on a trail crew was more demanding, more rewarding-more real-than she ever imagined. 

During her first season, Byl embraces the backbreaking difficulty of the work, learning how to clear trees, move boulders, and build stairs in the backcountry. Her first mentors are the colorful characters with whom she works-the packers, sawyers, and traildogs from all walks of life-along with the tools in her hands: axe, shovel, chainsaw, rock bar. As she invests herself deeply in new work, the mountains, rivers, animals, and weather become teachers as well. While Byl expected that her tenure at the parks would be temporary, she ends up turning this summer gig into a decades-long job, moving from Montana to Alaska, breaking expectations-including her own-that she would follow a "professional" career path. 

Returning season after season, she eventually leads her own crews, mentoring other trail dogs along the way. In Dirt Work, Byl probes common assumptions about the division between mental and physical labor, "women's work" and "men's work," white collars and blue collars. The supposedly simple work of digging holes, dropping trees, and blasting snowdrifts in fact offers her an education of the hands and the head, as well as membership in an utterly unique subculture. Dirt Work is a contemplative but unsentimental look at the pleasures of labor, the challenges of apprenticeship, and the way a place becomes a home.

Read the Introduction at Scribd.

 

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Check out the Get Your Hands Dirty blog tour:

Tales of a Mountain Family
Monday, April 22

Hike, Bike, Travel
Tuesday, April 23

The Cleanest Line
Wednesday, April 24

The Campsite
Thursday, April 25

Half Past Done
Friday, April 26

Hiker to Hiker
Saturday, April 27

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About the Author

Christine Byl lives on a few acres of tundra north of Denali National Park outside the town of Healy, Alaska, with her husband and an old sled dog. She received her MFA in fiction from the University of Alaska-Anchorage, and her stories and essays have appeared in magazines, journals, and anthologies. She owns and operates a small trail design and construction business.

 

 

Related articles

Connecting With Nature on Earth Day and Every Day

Teachers - and Activists - In Their Own Words

Ready, set, hike

Trail makeover

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

 

Related articles

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

Recommended Reading for World Water Day

Beacon Buzz: Gather at the Table, Faitheist, and more!

On Tour

Gather at the Table: The Healing Journey of a Daughter of Slavery and a Son of the Slave Trade by Thomas Norman DeWolf and Sharon Leslie Morgan

An interview with authors DeWolf and Morgan on NPR’s Tell Me More aired Christmas Day.

The authors begin the West Coast leg of their tour this weekend. The entire month of January, they’ll be making appearances in Washington, Oregon, California, and Colorado. Check out their website for more info.

SEATTLE, WA: January 6, 2013, 2:00pm: Northwest African American Museum.
2300 South Massachusetts St., Seattle, WA; sponsored by New Legacy Puget Sound. Book sales by Elliott Bay Book Company. 

ELLENSBERG, WA: January 8, 2013, 7:00pm: Central Washington University. 

PULLMAN, WA: January 10, 2013, 7:00pm: Washington State University.

REDMOND, OR: January 11, 2013, 6:30pm: Paulina Springs Books.

SISTERS, OR: January 12, 2013, 6:30pm: Paulina Springs Books.

PORTLAND, OR: January 13, 2013, 7:30pm: Powell’s Books.

PORTLAND, OR: January 14, 2013, 12:00 noon: The Portland Building. Sponsored by DEEP (Diverse and Empowered Employees of Portland)

BEND, OR: January 15, 2013, 6:30pm: Bend’s Community Center 1036 NE 5th Street.

BERKELY, CA: January 18, 2013, 4:00pm: University of California at Berkeley.
Chevron Auditorium, International House. Sponsored by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Equity & Inclusion.

WALNUT CREEK, CA: January 19, 2013, 2:00pm: Mt. Diablo Unitarian Universalist Church. Co-sponsored by the Mt. Diablo Peace & Justice Center.

SAN FRANCISCO, CA: January 20, 2013, 2:00pm: Museum of the African Diaspora.

PASADENA, CA: January 23, 2013, 5:00pm: La Pintoresca Library.

SANTA MONICA, CA: January 25, 2013, 7:00pm: location in Santa Monica TBA: sponsored by CARE/Multicultural Healing.

POMONA, CA: January 26, 2013: 2:00pm: Pomona First Christian Church.

DENVER, CO: January 29, 2013: 7:00pm: University of Denver.

DENVER, CO: January 30, 2013: 6:30, meet the authors; 7:00 program begins: Park Hill United Methodist Church. The evening program will open with a performance by Sankofa, an ensemble of the Spirituals Project Choir.

 

Notable Appearances & Mentions

Faitheist: How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious by Chris Stedman

These are just the highlights. Faitheist has been everywhere recently! Check out his website or follow him on Twitter to keep up to date.

The Melissa Harris-Perry Show/MSNBC (MSNBC also published a piece by Chris on their website. “In the Wake of Newtown, Why Blame Atheists?”

Utne Reader review in January/February issue.

Interview with Amy Goetzman at Minnpost.com books: “As I read your book, at several places I was struck by how brave you are.”

A playlist on Largeheartedboy from Chris about music that relates the book.

A post by Chris on Patheos about reactions to Faitheist.

 

 

Best of 2012

Notes of a Native Son by James Baldwin

PW’s year end round up included this article by Robert Atwan on the 10 best essays written since 1950. “Notes of a Native Son” is #1.

Choice Magazine Outstanding Academic Titles for 2012: 

Let the Students Speak!: A History of the Fight for Free Expression in American Schools by David L. Hudson 

Prophetic Encounters: Religion and the American Radical Tradition by Dan McKanan 

 

The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth by Fred Pearce

Bloomberg’s BusinessWeek best books of 2012

 

A Queer and Pleasant Danger: The true story of a nice Jewish boy who joins the Church of Scientology and leaves twelve years later to become the lovely lady she is today by Kate Bornstein

Washington Blade’s roundup of 2012’s best LGBT books

 

Coming Soon

Into Great Silence by Eva Saulitis (Jan. 15)

Booklist review, Jan 01: “Saulitis’ stunning and sorrowful ‘book of contemplation’ elucidates the discipline, tedium, danger, and bliss of whale studies… Candid, transfixing, and cautionary, Saulitis celebrates and mourns for a wondrous and imperiled species.” 

 

Intensive Care: A Doctor’s Journey by Danielle Ofri (March 05)

New York Times op-ed: "Labs, Washed Away"

 

 

Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East by Rashid Khalidi (March 12)

Kirkus Reviews in print (Jan. 15) and online (Jan. 01): “in sharp, take-no-prisoners prose, Khalidi maintains that the U.S. and Israel… have conspired to deny Palestinians any semblance of self-determination.  A stinging indictment of one-sided policymaking destined, if undisturbed, to result in even greater violence.”

“Drawing on his own experience as a Palestinian negotiator and recently released documents, Rashid Khalidi mounts a frontal attack on the myths and misconceptions that have come to surround America’s role in the so-called “peace process” which is all process and no peace. The title is not too strong:  the book demonstrates conclusively that far from serving as an honest broker, the US continues to act as Israel’s lawyer – with dire consequences for its own interests, for the Palestinians, and for the entire region. Professor Khalidi deserves much credit for his superb exposition of the fatal gap between the rhetoric and reality of American diplomacy on this critically important issue.” —Avi Shlaim, Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

 

Dirt Work: An Education in the Woods by Christine Byl (April 16)

"Every denizen of wild places from Laotse to St. Francis to Rachel Carson to black bears to field mice has depended upon trails. But rarely have we considered the people, tools, or toil that lay our favorite trails down. Dirt Work is a spectacular correction of this omission. Imbued with a tough-minded, ribald reverence for honest labor that brings to mind a female Gary Snyder or Wendell Berry (if you can imagine that!), Christine Byl does epic justice to the whole-bodied satisfactions that come of staying out in the weather, staying alert, and working one’s ass off for others with love, tenacity and skill."  --David James Duncan, author of The River Why and Sun House.

“Christine Byl has been summering on trail crews for more than a decade and a half. A first-rate storyteller, she details the techniques and tools, and the spirit of fellowship and feel of the woods. If you love getting into the back country, or even if you're an armchair backpacker as I am now at age eighty, you'll love Dirt Work.”    --William Kittredge, author of Hole in the Sky and The Nature of Generosity

“Byl’s is not a world of groomed nature, inert tools, or nostalgic rituals, but a vibrant landscape inhabited by people and animals and layered by idea and history. She means this book as a love song, she writes, and it is, not only from her to her fellow laborers, but from the mind to the body, the hand to the tool, the human to the wild.” —Sherry Simpson, author of The Accidental Explorer: Wayfinding in Alaska

 

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Beacon Buzz: Moral Injury, Faitheist, and the Get Bitten blog tour

Interview with a Faitheist

Beacon Buzz: "A writer of uncommon, bracing eloquence."

Chris Stedman - Faitheist : How an Atheist Found Common Ground with the Religious

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.