———————– ** Fresh Green Beans ** ———————– Grown in Kansas. Eaten Worldwide.

Despite my many visits; I had never really seen the Haskell-Baker wetlands until I had saw them through the eyes of Mike Caron, a passionate scholar and activist of wetland habitats who has a way with words.

As a fellow environmentalist I mirrored Mike’s respect for the wetlands and was eager for the tour by a man who knew so much about its dynamics and history. But before our trek even got started, a sad and disturbing sight confronted us.

Not 20 feet from the edge of the Haskell Indian’s Memorial Grounds, noisy earthmovers were mindlessly digging up the land and hauling the dirt away. The Memorial Grounds are recognized historical site and a memorial for the many dead First Nations children that attended the Haskell Boarding School - an assimilation institution intent on, as Mike put it, “killing the savage and saving the man”.

What these titans of construction were doing is unknown, and how they had permission to do so is even more confusing. According to Mike, a historical site should have no construction done around it. This fact, however, did not stop the erection of sewage lift stations, which pipe sewage near the symbolic headstones (the actual graves are mythed to be under the basketball courts) and the wetlands for processing.

Sadly, this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the many cultural and environmental injustices that have befallen Haskell land.

The Haskell-Baker wetlands are a historically and culturally significant area for many different First Nations people. It is significant because of the way people of many Nations were forced together for their reeducation. The land is imbued with the traces of these people and the many trials they faced here together.

From a Eurocentric perspective, the land was seen as unproductive and a dumping ground for vagabonds and waste. However, from an ecological perspective; wetlands serve as an important, and continually rarified, ecosystem. The wetlands ecosystem exists in a delicate balance of environmental factors and life cycles which make it home to hundreds of environment specific plant and animal species. For the First Nations people the land is sacred and life-giving. These contrasting views represent the struggle of these people while modernity encroaches onto their lands and into their world.

This struggle continues today. Presently, there is a critical issue that has been raging for the past 20 years: the proposed South Lawrence Trafficway (SLT). This highly contested highway, intended to relieve traffic congestion in the city of Lawrence, threatens to rob the wetlands of its cultural significance and ecological diversity. The wetlands has long been a place where people have come to take comfort in its wild refuge, to study, to pray, to come together in solidarity with their families and their community. The construction of the SLT would result in the loss of one more valuable wild area, just to be replaced by more development and sprawl. One more loss for our increasingly diluted culture, and one more win for our market-driven globalized world.

What we are seeing here on the local scale in Lawrence is a severe clash of values, and assumptions made by our Western views and values. It seems difficult for immigrated peoples to realize the integral nature of an environment and its peoples. Instead, non-natives view their relationship to their habitat with neoliberal economically tinted glasses; that is as individuals’ divorced from the land that they view as a commodity and nature being something to control rather than to respect and nourish. These views of our neoliberal globalized society further perpetuate environmental injustices on land that is, in the view of many, priceless.

-Juliana Tran

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A Rainy Day at The Wetlands By Juliana Tran

Top Photo by Wally Emerson

The Lawrence Sustainability Network, LSN, was born in 2006 of skepticism and hope. LSN’s founders did not believe that politicians could be counted on to halt our society’s steady march toward the precipice of environmental destruction, economic collapse, and social instability. Instead, they believed that individuals would have to decide for themselves to leave the herd and find another path, to find other disaffected souls, and learn to live lightly and sustainably on planet Earth. Herein lies hope, hope for other species, our families, our communities, and hope for the future.

It is not surprising that we must first act individually in the decision to live differently. American society glorifies individualism and competition, teaching each of us that we will sink or swim on our own merits. So it is no small irony that our first steps away from destruction are personal initiatives to develop a collective response. We in LSN believe community building is key to our success. Together we can imagine what a more sustainable world might look like. We can pool our ideas and our resources, and we can share the daunting task of figuring out how to make the transition from where we are to where we want to be. The introduction to LSN’s vision statement, taken from our website, sets out in broad strokes what we would like to accomplish:

Ecological sustainability means living in a way that is mindful of consequences for the future. We envision a community built around livelihood strategies that protect the commons of clean air, soil and water; deliver efficient, affordable, clean and renewable energy; prioritize local food systems; and promote biological diversity so that future generations of people and other species can also satisfy their basic needs. In this community ‘development’ will mean improving the quality of life for all people in the Lawrence area, fostering social justice in the distribution of available resources and opportunities, and fortifying our local economy toward the goal of self-sufficiency. Social relationships are equally important to ecological sustainability; the social world we will advance will be built on mutual aid, trust, equity, and participatory democracy.

A just and healthy world is LSN’s hope for the future. It will take many hands and minds and hearts, coming together in community, to bring it about.

~ Jane Gibson

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“All creation is connected and interdependent. If any part of the system is upset, the whole system is affected. There is no separation between our land and our spirituality; this is simply our way of life… We grow ourselves out of the land.”
– Nasbah Ben, a coordinator of the Save the Peaks campaign and a member of the Navajo Nation in Canyon de Chelly, Arizona.

The San Francisco Peaks are sacred mountains that are revered by thirteen different First Nation groups in Flagstaff, Arizona, including Nasbah’s own Navajo people, the Diné.

These days, the land isn’t used for ceremony, or herb gathering; rather, the land is restricted for use by the Arizona Snowbowl, which now occupies the Peaks. This huge, barely used, ski resort was erected for the wealthy of the area, seemingly mocking the mountains that were deemed as holy by the local people for centuries.

Now, to add insult to injury, if the Arizona Snowbowl wins a pending court case, they will be able to continue developing their resort and start using recycled sewage water to create artificial snow - controversial because of the dangers it may cause to the environment and in turn, the people.

This is an issue that isn’t just about the San Francisco Peaks but about the rights of all humans to protect their environment and maintain their relationships with the land.

Since the ski resort was built in the 1960’s, there continues to be resistance by the Navajo and those who have sided with this solidarity movement to stop further development of the resort and maintain respect for this once sacred space. Unfortunately, their voices are barely heard.

In an interview with Nasbah - it seems as if only superficial legislation have been passed to help protect sacred land, such as various Executive Orders passed under Bill Clinton, which consider the voices of the native people in the area, but won’t stop companies from development. These measures seem only to be symbolic, projecting an illusion of environmental justice while effecting no actual change, but only placating the demands of both the activists and corporate interests.

The issue with the San Francisco Peaks and the Snowbowl represents the tremendous amount of injustice that occurs to many minority populations and low-income populations all over the nation. Environmental justice works to keep these populations respected by public policy and corporate development, but often it is the case that these voices aren’t heard.

Environmentalism goes hand in hand with Human Rights; it should be a natural right for people to have clean water, clean air, and sacred space.

In this world, it seems that only the wealthy can afford to choose their environment and modify it to their liking, while there are groups like the Navajo, who are marginalized from wealth and political persuasion. These people represent those of many that are victims of structural violence – when people are subjected to poor lifestyles and harm because of exploitive social structures and institutions. Despite trying to voice their opinion, power plants are erected in their neighborhoods and amusement parks put on their temples.

How can we heal this rift, which separates a clean and healthy person from a clean and healthy environment? How can we stop the destructive development, which is built on the homes of the poor just to be out of the sight of the wealthy? And how can we make this change global? These are questions that the baby boomers and generation X have placed squarely on our shoulders, and we do not have their luxury of leaving them unanswered.

-Juliana Tran

San Francisco Peaks: Flickr

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As a child, I lived next to a swamp. It was a place of foreboding, where rumor had it that if particles of the spongy heads of cattails, or bulrushes as they were more commonly known got in your eyes, you’d go blind.

Writing this article, it has just occurred to me how naïve I was in believing that by draining the swamp in preference for a low-cost housing scheme, it would be a viable alternative to the prospect of dozens of kids walking around with white sticks and guide dogs. With hindsight, I’ve come to appreciate the value of preserving fragile ecosystems, at a time when they face a growing threat through industrialization, population explosion and pollution. I now know that a swamp is not just an ominous wasteland, but a wetland, that contrary to belief, cattails have strong medicinal properties, are edible and have many other uses, quite apart from their valuable role in supporting an abundance of wildlife.

It’s estimated that more than one-third of the United States’ threatened and endangered species live only in wetlands like this. Spring Swamp by Ray Devlin.

Around the globe, man’s impact on the land has meant that over 50 percent of the world’s wetlands have been lost, and if only 10 percent are protected according to UNESCO estimates, it means most are in danger of becoming extinct, and with it our priceless natural heritage. When will it all stop? When every bit of earth is occupied by a building, a golf course or a mine? When we try to rediscover our past and a voice rings out:

“Ladies and gentlemen, in this part of the museum we have the prehistoric creatures … and moving along to the 17th century, you have the famous dodo bird, to most recent times with the now extinct white pelican, the great egret, hippopotamus, alligator, osprey … .”

By then, it would have been too late - a world gone blind to the destruction of its precious resources.

-Denzyl

I remember a few years ago I had to write an 800 word essay on an Allen Ginsberg poem called “My Sad Self.” Ginsberg was a weird, depressed dude and after three hours staring blankly at the page I was feeling pretty weird and depressed myself. While on the verge of tears, it finally clicked with me. I was overcomplicating things. Ginsberg’s poem was reflecting the importance of a place - the narrator’s home. This was easy. Ginsberg was telling the reader, in a non-overt way, why New York City matters; why the narrator should leave it behind, why he should love it and why the reader should even care in the first place. It wasn’t any more difficult than that. It was poetry from the gut, and it hit me hard.

It’s the same sort of reflection I found in reading the poetry of the Wakarusa Wetlands, which I guess is sort of like New York City for the Great Plains Skink or the Smallmouth Salamander. I’ve never been real interested in animals. I used to have some goldfish growing up, and for a brief period of time I held a small snapping turtle captive in our front yard. When I see a report in the New York Times on endangered wildlife I get a little sad … but not that much. When a historian lectures me on biodiversity I become drowsy, lethargic and hungry. I’m willing to bet others have a similar reaction. “So they want to build a highway through the Wakarusa Wetlands? Sounds good to me. Lawrence traffic sucks dude. Let’s go lift some weights.” That’s probably a typical reaction from a typical college student.

This is where the poetry comes in. Here’s one example of the poetry that has been so connected to the “save the wetlands” campaign. Others can be found in book Wakarusa Wetlands in Words & Image. Read this and reflect:

Roadkill

If you can’t put a bullet
through it, put a road
through it: that killing
only takes a little longer.
Name the road after what you destroy:
Haskell Highway
or Wetlands Expressway
The Wildlife?
They’ll be fine, stuffed
behind glass
in the steel and concrete
Nature Center, soundproofed
from the road’s roar.
The spirits? Who
believes that claptrap anyway.
not with a gun but
a bulldozer.
shoot, shoot.

-Brian Daldorph

 Daldorph is throwing daggers, and I can feel it. The final line is brilliant. Daldorph’s poem hits me the same way Ginsberg’s did. It makes me feel the magic of a place and why it’s worth saving. You don’t have to be a committed environmentalist to be moved by it. Like Ginsberg’s poem, the message is not overly complex. It’s simple and makes a point.

The poem is also apolitical, poignant and relevant. In others words, it represents a different type of way to talk about the environment in public. Poetry like Daldorph’s offers a competing narrative to the divisive political sparring that bogs down far too many discussions on environmental topics. In the words of Robert Frost, “poetry is what gets lost in translation.” People want to see and feel something. There’s a reason why everyone knows Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” (”they paved paradise and put up a parking lot”), but can’t quote carbon dioxide emission regulations or fuel economy standards. There’s a simple resonance to Mitchell’s words; the same resonance found in Wakarusa Wetlands in Word & Image.

A newspaper story loaded with numbers and jargon is just too distant - irrelevant even. There’s a place for factual regurgitation, but it’s not likely to connect with people the same way a verse of poetry does. Poetry is a small way to combat labels like “treehugger”, animal lover, hippie, and lunatic that get attached to those who get close to nature. With Daldorph’s poem you’re none of those. You’re just a human being and sometimes that’s enough.

-Vince Meserko

While scrolling through past posts on the popular blog “Stuff White People Like“, I couldn’t help but notice that many of the things white people seem to like have been discussed on this blog: farmer’s markets, veganism, transportation, bottled water, and even evil corporations, just to name a few. Based on this, environmental injustice shouldn’t really exist, right?

In all seriousness, though, I recall listening to Dr. Dorceta Taylor speak on “Diversity and the Environment” last fall during the Greening of the Campus VII conference at Ball State University. In discussing her impressive program at the University of Michigan and minorities in environmental leadership, she dispelled the myth that “minorities aren’t interested in the environment”. Dr. Taylor argued that it wasn’t a matter of not caring but of using a different terminology for the issues that minority communities face. Sadly, the concept of “justice” isn’t always the first thing that comes to mind when people talk about “environmentalism”. In any case, Dr. Taylor’s argument is yet another reminder that environmentalism is about more than just being “green”

- Jeff

by Mohamed Sami, energytribune.com

“This isn’t a political issue. This is a moral issue,” the former politician claimed triumphantly.

“Woo!” I called out from my theater chair, pumping my fist in the air like I was Captain Planet, ready to combine the five element rings. “You’re damn right!”

I looked around for some support from the rest of the audience, 90 percent of which was made up of half-empty cups of flat Coke and overturned popcorn buckets from the last movie that played. My fellow planeteers were nowhere in sight, even though I could have sworn that I saw Heart ducking down in the front row, apparently a little embarrassed by my outburst.

I thought my Heart was in the right place.

So I decided that if the audience wouldn’t come to the movie theater, I would have the movie theater come to the audience. I set up screenings of the documentary and invited everyone that I had even remotely come in contact with to come watch it.

Some showed up. A few of my Republican friends gave me the stink-eye when I told them what it was. “More like Al Snore,” they said.

People came and went. I gave complimentary recycle cans to people for hanging out with me, but they still didn’t seem too interested in anything Gore or I had to say.

Unfortunately, 22 showings later, I still couldn’t pinpoint why no one cared.

And then Media and the Environment dawned on me.

Environmental storytellers have a hard time connecting the dots that the audience needs to have connected for them. We tell people to recycle, to save the Amazon, to quit breathing so often, but we hardly tell them the most relevant part: why it’s important.

I don’t shop at The Merc to save the polar bears. I don’t make my roommates unplug the microwave (and soon the refrigerator, they joke) because the glaciers are melting. I do it so we can save ourselves.

We are so used to people being able to string the concepts together themselves that we don’t realize that this time we need to be the ones providing the glue of the conversation.

We are the eco-friendly adhesives.

It saddens me that a more expensive case of Bud Select has my friends more worried about the state of the environment than a carbon dioxide graph did, but I’m ready to meet them where they are: at the grocery store.

Al Gore and “An Inconvenient Truth” didn’t doom the environmental movement.

Leonardo DiCaprio and “The 11th Hour” didn’t doom the environmental movement.

Our (PowerPoint) presentation doomed the environmental movement.

Until environmentalists can reframe their argument and make the environment relevant to the general public, it will be our movement’s 11th hour.

-Lauren Keith

There is an old saying, “There is nothing new under the sun.”

photo courtesy of astro.uva.nl

However, after a semester researching and analyzing environmental media content, I have come to think that environmental problems are in fact new. The earth has seen environmental transitions and changes before, but never has the cause of those problems had the intelligence and technology to stop and possibly reverse it’s impact.

Human beings have had to make difficult decisions before, such as whether to go to war or how to feed ourselves. But the environment brings a level of complexity in the decision making process that we haven’t had to deal with before

Because these problems are new, we have a difficult time figuring out solutions. This makes communicating about the issues equally daunting. As our blog illustrates, we all have different ideas about how to fix the problems, and how to communicate about the problems. In traditional media, the issues are discussed, like most things, as polarizing opposites in conflict. The benefit of new media sources is that there is opportunity to discuss the issues as people problems, rather than political problems.

The one constant in all of this is that the environment isn’t a Democratic issue. It isn’t a Republican issue. It isn’t a rich issue. And it isn’t a poor issue. It is a people issue. The brilliant thing about people is that we are all different. And the frustrating thing about people is that we are all different. Because of that, there is no one answer for how to reach everybody to inform and educate them about sustainability.

What has come through all of this, for me, is that you have to talk to people where they are. What is important to them. And show them how by being sustainable, they are really making everything that is important to them better. Basically, you have to talk to them on a personal level.

So even though the problems are more complex than anything under the sun, the way to communicate about them is as old as dirt.

photo courtesy of pioneerasphaltinc.com

-Adam

Stories and ideas of respect for land are passed down by elders from generation to generation in Native American culture.

Photo by Russ Stokes:http://www.flickr.com/people/schooksonruss/

If we page through our history books, most of us can find specific themes of intolerance and domination between Native Americans and westerners throughout the years: Land. Religion. Drug use. These misunderstandings(an understatement)have caused rifts that continue on today, as cities grow larger and communities grow older. Differences in ideas and inabilities to communicate and understand conflicts of interest keep the fire alive in the battles between western ideas of progression and Native American ideas of preservation.

Locally, the Wakarusa, or Baker, Wetlands, are one example of gross misunderstanding among Lawrence residents. The Kansas Department of Transportation (KDOT), as well as many Lawrencians, are in favor of a proposed 10-lane trafficway that would cut straight through the Wetlands and supposedly lessen heavy traffic on 23^rd Street. This traffic way would connect West Lawrence with East Lawrence, and get commuters back and forth between surrounding cities. What seems like a progressive move on the planning side is a perilous move on the emotional and environmental side.

To Natives, these Wetlands are sacred grounds that are home to spirits and spirituality. To non-humans, these Wetlands are home to 255 species of exotic and (some) endangered birds, including the American symbol of freedom, the bald eagle. Yet, to those who prefer convenience and growth, these Wetlands should be home to pound after pound of paint and pavement.

On a national and historical scale, these incidences are not uncommon. Court cases from the 20 years ago, such as Lyng vs. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, document the strifes and misunderstandings that go along with any case involving Native Americans and land destruction. In that case, the government wanted to build a road through a national forest that was sacred to Native American religion, which “depend upon privacy, silence, and an undisturbed natural setting.” Similar arguments—intrusion on sacred land, prohibition on peaceful exercise of religion—were used then, suggesting that these Natives pass down, from generation to generation, ideas of preservation and respect for holy land that westerns are unable to grasp because of differences in appreciation.

These ideas of misunderstanding and disrespect for those who hold different things dear to their hearts is at the center of controversies that involve Native Americans and land. One side will always argue that what belongs to one in the eyes of the current law seals the deal—such as the case with the Baker Wetlands belonging to Baker University. The other side will always counter with the idea that common courtesy and respect for a minority that has always taken the short end of the deal since day one should be honored, or at least compromised with, in order to maintain community harmony and order. Whichever way the Native American story is sliced, almost anybody who barely paid attention in history should be able to predict the ending…unless you stand up and voice a powerful opinion now.

If you’re interested in preserving the Wetlands, let your voice be heard at City Hall, the local newspaper and in Wetlands cyberspace.

-Kim