Caleb Kasper’s Literal Environmental History
I wanted movement and not a calm course of existence. I wanted excitement and danger and the chance to sacrifice myself for my love. I felt in myself a superabundance of energy which found no outlet in our quiet life. Leo Tolstoy “Family Happiness” Oftentimes I wonder whether one is endowed with a certain amount of negative karma for just being a member of the human race. In order to counteract this negative karma must we constantly work against the environmentally damaging practices which are so often associated with human nature? Karma or not, I believe we as humans must turn from our selfish, environmentally damaging ways. Our character should ask us to work for the greater good of the environment. Indeed it is our duty to do so. I wrote for the first course assignment that I am aware of many of my impacts upon the Earth. The book Stuff was interesting, but not enlightening. What will enlighten me the most is to reminisce upon the history of my life, and how it shaped my plan to be a spokesman and defender of the Earth. Rather than examine the negative and positive impacts my life has had upon the well being of the environment in which we live, I want to simply examine the events which shaped me into the person I am today. I was born almost 21 years ago in Anacortes, Washington. The ferry took my mom from Guemes Island to Anacortes Island, the location of the only hospital in the San Juan Islands. This hospital is where my mother had to have a c-section to save both her life and mine. My mother, being an Earth loving, back-to-the-land hippie, had intended to give birth to me with a midwife. However, things didn’t work our right and I came into the world mechanistically. It is interesting that, even though I tend toward some ludite tendencies, I would not be here were it not for modern technology. However, I intend to leave the Earth naturally; no chloroform, no formaldehyde, just ashes to the wind. From an early age I heard stories of activism and agitation from both my parents. We have moved from place to place throughout my life, just as Alan Durning lamented in This Place on Earth, but in each place I’ve inhabited, two things have remained the same; the need to do what is right environmentally and the yearning to return to the Pacific Northwestern Bioregion. My mother led a group called SCANP (Skagitonians Concerned About Nuclear Power) from 1976 to 1980 that fought against the construction of a twin reactor nuclear power plant on the Skagit River in Northwestern Washington. This power plant would not only produce large quantities of deadly radioactive waste, but would also dam the precious Skagit River to use for coolant. The salmon spawning grounds would be destroyed, Skagitonians’ lives would be threatened, and nuclear waste would stay on Washington soil for an eternity. By organizing an annual benefit music festival (Musicians included; Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Brown, and my father), educating the citizens of the region, and by not backing down to the nuclear power industry, SCANP succeeded in preventing the construction of the nuclear power plant. SCANP won by creating a coalition of concerned citizens. A coalition that encompassed people of all trades, races, and classes. From this story I have learned valuable lessons about persistence, creativity, and compromise. After I was born, my father, mother, and I moved away from the rainy Pacific Northwest Bioregion to the arid southwest of northern New Mexico. Here our family joined a community farm. My mother, father, and I lived in the base of a windmill, and ate communally with the rest of the members of Ojido, meaning “communal subsistence farm” in Spanish. Some of my earliest memories involve hiking with my father in the hot dry land. I would ride on his shoulders as he explained the intricacies of the desert ecosystem and the need to be respectful of its inhabitants. I was taught to be a dedicated and invited guest on the land. More than once we hiked over a hill to a low place where water gathered after the spring rains. The mud hole remained until mid June, and we would role naked in it until we were completely covered in the thick clean high desert clay. The smell of earth would invade my nostrils as we walked, letting the sun dry the the clay, until the mud cracked, shrunk and flaked off taking with it the impurities from our pores. We lived a simple life, one which involved my homeschooling with other children of Ojido, and daily chores that, although I was only four years old, involved responsibility. I fed the goats and picked tomatoes, beans, and other veggies for the farmer’s market. Rather than being raised from an early age getting “meat product” from the store, vegetables from the shelf, or milk from the jug, consumer forgetfulness and abstraction had little to do with my life as I lived with the animals and played in the garden. I was encouraged to be creative, to be respectful and thoughtful, and ultimately love nature and what it provided. Although we lived away from civilization we were not politically passive, and in 1984, when Mondale ran against Ronald Reagan I was in Moriarite in the voting booth with my mother. I remember the hell in her eyes when Reagan won. I knew that voicing one’s opinions was the right thing to do, even before I understood what a democracy was. My time on Ojido instilled in me many important life lessons. I will never forget that it is possible to live simply and sustainably upon the Earth. After moving to Santa Fe, and then to Pojauque, we finally settled in Laramie, New Mexico for a time. We lived for free in a trailer on the movie set of “Silverado”. (My father has two parts in the film, one where he is playing the mouth harp and another involves him yelling an obscenity). Again we had our own garden, goats, and chickens, but the communal aspect was gone. According to my mother this was one of the most creative times in my life. I had a lot of solitude, and my mind would wonder with the open desert plains of that area beyond the Sangre de Christo mountain range. Looking back at my time in Silverado I like to draw a symbolic connection between that time of creativity and my place today. Today I regularly question the authenticity of the American society, the “American pop culture”, and the relationships people have with one another. Spending time wandering the streets of that fake town, I saw that the buildings appeared real and substantive with the high windows and wood siding of the romanticized wild west. However, looking from a different perspective would reveal that the thin, front wall was held up behind by braces. There was nothing behind the mask of authenticity. I believe now that our society is based too much in appearances, consumerism, and capitalism and not enough on awareness, biocentrism , and sustainability. I want to help people to look from a different perspective at the environmentally damaging society we have allowed to get away from us. We need to see that elements of the “American dream” are empty, and in order to build a real society we must not have just a mask of economy surrounding emptiness, but a economy that is based about and sustainable with the house that is the Earth. My formative years were filled with my father’s music, my mother’s art, and my own spawning creativity. We always lived outside of the city limits if not rurally, but I never took the land for granted. I climbed on the lava rock, played in the encompassing bows of the Juniper tree, and ran with the wind on the rocky ground. I knew the land was beautiful, and I knew it was my responsibility to be aware of its fragility. I was proud to bring home litter that I’d found on my adventures, and animated in my descriptions of the damage done to nature by off-road-vehicle pests and the ranchers of the area. At an early age I was included in the environmental activism of my mother. Part of the reason we had moved from Washington is that my parents wanted to start over after the exhausting fight against the nuclear power plant. They wanted to live in a place safe from oppressive corporations, free from the rain, and a place still wild with uncorrupted natural beauty. It did not take long for reality to hit home in New Mexico. After moving several more times we again settled for a number of years, this time in El Ancon. The rent was cheap for the old dirt floored house nestled in the Pecos River Valley. Our family quickly made friends in the valley. These included the owners of a family winery, a sculptor and his family, a lesbian couple, and an old man with rabbits and goats. Bill and Elise Madison owned the Madison Winery down the road in Ribera. They regularly received shipments of materials for the winery and wine making, and in the spring of 1988 Bill received one of these shipments. When the back of the UPS truck was opened Bill grabbed his boxes, but noticed a number of odd looking barrels in the back of the truck. The barrels bore the familiar symbols of radioactive hazard. Inquiring as to the origin and recipient of the barrels, Bill learned that the intended recipient was local land owner Dr. Guy Elliot. Dr. Elliot was a retired Los Alomos nuclear physicist who had hired laborers from the community to help build a concrete building on his newly acquired land. Elliot claimed that he was building a tortilla factory when in fact he had gotten a license from the state to do nuclear experiments in a laboratory. Elliot was getting away with this because San Miguel county, where we all lived, did not have any zoning laws. He thought he could conduct nuclear experiments within a mile from the Pecos River and not tell anyone from the community. It turned out that Dr. Elliot was being supported and supplied with radioactive material from Rocky Flats Nuclear Laboratory in Colorado, and Hanford Nuclear Laboratory in Washington. Further, the experiments he was conducting were with the goal of producing low level depleted Uranium tipped armor piercing shells for use in war. My mother and her new found friends formed the citizens group Los Amigos del Rio, “friends of the river”. They educated themselves, investigated Dr. Elliot’s past, and studied the possible effects of the laboratory on the surrounding area. To no avail they pressured the state to take responsibility. They hired a lawyer. At a public hearing in late 1989, Dr. Guy Elliot admitted to not only working with nuclear weapons material, but storing nuclear waste upon the property. Several geological nuclear waste repositories had been prepared at that time, but both of the repositories in our area, Yucca Mountain Nevada, and the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Southern New Mexico had not been deemed safe for the storage of high and low level nuclear waste from weapons production or spent nuclear fuel rods from nuclear power plants. Department of Energy weapons production sites felt the need to continue experimenting with nuclear weapons production, but their sites were overflowing with waste while they waited for the repositories to open. Besides the fact that there was no safe place to store the deadly nuclear waste, shipments of waste had started. Some waste had eventually ended up illegally stored above ground on the property of Dr. Guy Elliot. Needless to say, the community rose up against this clear encroachment of their fundamental rights to safety for themselves, their children, and future generations. The shit hit the fan when it was revealed that the prime contributor to Dr. Elliot’s work was Kerr-McGee Corporation in Oklahoma. Ker-McGee is notorious to selling fertilizer to Oklahoma farmers that turned out to be hazardous sludge. Kerr-McGee was shipping thorium to Elliot for further experiments when the San Miguel County drafted new zoning laws and the community of the Pecos River Valley ran Dr. Elliot out of the area. Corporate America will take advantage of people if it is given the chance. Environmental racism is real and happening today. I know, I was with my mother at every meeting of the group that was opposing Dr. Elliot. We represented an area that was very poor, and almost entirely Hispanic. The laboratory was most certainly put in that area for those reasons. Elliot did not expect to be opposed, but he also did not expect to run up against people who cared for their children, the river, and their rights. I learned to be constantly aware of my place, and I learned the benefits of community early, even though we moved quite often. When we moved from El Ancon to Montezuma, New Mexico in 1991, I still had the same place; the high desert and forests of northern New Mexico, but yet again I had a new community. Of all the areas I have lived in New Mexico, Montezuma became the place I associate most with as home. The four years I spent there were filled with adventures into the canyons and along the rivers. The pine forest was endless to me, and the stories of the bear and elk just drew me further into the beauty of the ecosystem. The place is vivid in my mind, and the people still live in my heart. We lived near the United World College of the American West, a college for high school juniors and seniors from all over the world. From Israelis to Palestinians, and Irish to English, the college was a place of integration. I realized then that the world was much smaller than I had previously assumed. The broad environmental problems I was just beginning to understand were much more salient than I had realized. Global warming, nuclear weapons and waste, oil-all these hit me like a ten pound hammer. Pollution knows no borders, but neither does ecological value, compassion, and activism. Students of the World College were studying to become peacemakers, environmentalists, and humanitarians. My introduction to the world was swift, and it brought me into my teen years with a passion. In a move which I still view with some regret, my parents and I migrated to Minnesota in late 1995. My mother wanted to reconnect with her Norwegian heritage, my father was looking for affordable land, and they wanted me to go to highschool in a place where racial tensions between anglo and Hispanic kids weren’t so much of an issue. We moved to Fergus Falls, a small, sterile town nestled deep within farming country. A popular myth held by the young people of the town is that Fergus is listed in the Guiness Book of World Records as having both the most churches per capita, and the highest percentage of senior citizens in the world. The place was boring, and to this day I feel uncomfortable there. We were involved in some environmental fights, one to prevent a turkey feedlot from being erected adjacently to the county’s only state park, and another to improve the efficiency of the coal burning power plant a half-mile from our home. I have not been able to find love for this place though. I see the importance of free family farms, of the Midwestern watersheds, and the animals of the bioregion, but my place is in the mountains. I feel uncomfortable when I can see for miles without a rise to spur my curiosity for the other side. I feel uncomfortable in a place where people love the land, but not for its intrinsic value, but rather for its agricultural excellence, hunting, and fishing. I got into anarchy for a short time. I don’t mean no rules, I just mean not their rules. My best friend and I envisioned a world free of the authority that wanted us to consume and live in boxes rather than commune and live with nature. I began to foster a personal distrust for the government, corporate America, and for authority in general. I still got good grades in school and played sports, but I realized the awful truth about society. I realized that the society based on capitalism was against everything I believed in. The unhindered free market allowed for the perversion of democracy, the attack on the environment and worker rights, and encouraged the sprawl of the “American pop culture” that so scared my parents. This period of my life gave in to a foundation of socialist ideals which I still hold to some extent. Looking back on my time in Fergus Falls I am not surprised that my environmental ideals, which were so strong in New Mexico, took second place to my social activism. I did not find place in Minnesota. I did not find beauty in wild nature nor did I find strong community- both were subdued. Now that I am in college, and I spend more time in Montana than I do in Fergus Falls, I have felt a resurgence of environmental thinking. I will return to the Pacific Northwest Bioregion in which I was born. However, I realize that, although my place is in the west, I am living in the Midwest, and it is my duty as a citizen of the Earth to do what I can while I am here. As I wrote earlier, I want to return to the Earth in as natural a way as possible. I recently learned a valuable lesson concerning this. My grandmother, Millie died earlier this month at the age of 96. Millie was a life-long conservative republican, and my mother had been chastised her entire life for being a liberal hippie and subsequent black sheep of the family. When my grandmother could no longer take care of herself my mother decided to devote her time to my grandmother’s last remaining years. It was a way for my mom to reconcile the bad karma between the two of them. Although I still am somewhat bitter towards my grandmother for the way she treated my mother, I can see how my mother was healed in those last three years of Millie’s life. Millie was blind, so my mother had to take her to the voting booth. My mom could not find it in her to allow Millie to vote for George W. Bush because she knew that, should Millie really understand politics, she would vote for Ralph Nader. Millie ate vegetarian meals at our house. My mother was able to show this old conservative what a good life we had. Finally, when Millie died my family handled all the burial matters. My sisters came out from Montana and I left St. Olaf for a few days. We washed my grandmother’s body, put with her in her coffin pictures, poems, and her loved possessions. Finally we transported her to the cemetery where she was laid to rest next to her husband. No funeral industry. No polluting formaldehyde. It was a simple, good ceremony, and it re-rooted my family together on an ecologically positive course. These are the experiences of my life. This is my personal history. It is just the beginning though, for much of it involved the teaching of my parents. Now I am independent. I have the deep seated values which will guide me to what is right. I look forward to returning to my place in the Pacific Northwest. As well as beauty and inspiration, I want to find community. I will return to Missoula, Montana for the second summer in a row and work with two environmental groups in internship positions. I will take with me what I have learned throughout my life, and at St. Olaf. I will act for the Earth, and do so from the base of my being. No compromise in defense of Mother Earth. It should not be denied... that being footloose
has always exhilarated us.
It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led west. Wallace Stegner, The American West as a Living Space |