Landing

Landing: Understanding and resolving human alienation from land
By Kathleen Dean Moore

I had been away for many days, sitting behind glass walls in one airport waiting room after another, cold and fidgety in a black plastic chair, uneasy under the grim eyes of security guards. With all the other lonely, tired, anxious people, I stood in lines with my identification in my hand. Then we were grinding through clouds thirty-five thousand feet above the earth. The noise was overwhelming and so was the silence of strangers crowded side by side, wincing when their elbows touched. I was startled when the flight attendant announced we would be landing.
"What did she say?" I asked the salesman next to me.
"We'll be landing soon--that's what she said." Seatback in an upright position, tray table locked, I seized on those words. Land is a noun, a solid, a place you come home to. Land is a set of relationships--ecosystems, hydrological cycles, ocean currents, neighborhoods, and nitrogen cycles, and the energy that flows among them. But land is also a verb, an action that people sometimes take: To land is to come into contact again (finally, blessedly) with the actual earth, a place that welcomes you, nourishes you, protects you, lifts you with relief. Suddenly, I wanted to land more than anything else in the world.
We have been away for many centuries, we people of the Western industrialized nations. We have built a culture on the mistaken assumption that human beings are independent of one another and of the places and systems of the earth. And so the mass of us lead lives of quiet separation, cutting ourselves off from the ecological and cultural communities that sustain us. The mass of us live apart from our parents and their memories, from our children and their grown-up hopes, from the sources of our food and energy and water, from our neighbors, from the wind and rain. Behind locked gates and Thermopane windows, in front of computer screens and air conditioning units, we might as well be suspended in the sky, for all the contact we have with the actual earth. The separation hurts: Isolated, uneasy, we crave something we can never buy and grieve for a loss we can't name.
Alienation from the land has allowed us to wage war against the water, the air, the fertile soil. We who depend on the life-sustaining systems of the earth can act in ways that harm them, only if we successfully convince ourselves, against all evidence, that the damage we do to the land is justified, or necessary, or inconsequential. So we buy into a set of illusions about our supposed separation from the land, and convince ourselves that our acts are conveniently disconnected from their consequences. Until we begin to tell the truth about the intimacy of our relation to natural places, I see no reason to hope that the work of reconciliation with the land can begin.
What are the illusions of separation and self-sufficiency that allow us to think of ourselves as sensible people, while we make decisions that sabotage the ecological systems on which our lives depend?

Today / Tomorrow
Caught up in the moment, we act as if today were somehow disconnected from tomorrow, as if we floated in a holy present, untethered from what has come before us, unaffected by and certainly not responsible for what will happen next.
Surely, I say to myself, no one believes it's possible to sever the connection between past, present, and future. But how else could people who love their children act in ways that diminish or destroy the world in which their children will live? How else could voters allow industry's endless mining of the land and the lakes and the seas, liquidating the earth's assets, extinguishing species forever, holding this great going-out-of-business sale, and forget that it is our children who will be left standing in the empty store?
As we disregard the future, time spirals through us. The presences and absences--what remains and what will never be again--are a result of decisions made by the people who came before us. And our children will live in the world we are creating today, as we bustle about, planting the seeds of cancer and the seeds of hollyhocks, tall and green. Will we cut the last ancient forests and empty the oceans? Will we foul the desert with uranium-tipped missiles and litter the arctic with discarded oil-drilling rigs? Will we drench strawberry fields with Diazinon and lace the spinach with 2,4-D? Will we undermine the power of antibiotics and create new weeds that can never be controlled?
We can look back at our parents' decisions--about pesticides, radioactive waste, PCB's, the grand and fatal dams--and say that perhaps our parents didn't understand the consequences of their acts. When our children look back on our decisions, they won't allow us that excuse.
God knows, it's easy enough to delude ourselves that the damage done to the earth's natural systems has nothing to do with us. Our language invites us to dodge responsibility. "The species went extinct," we say. "The forest was clear-cut." "The river was dammed." "The last fish was caught." "The aquifer was contaminated." Always the passive voice, the sentence where the agent has gone missing. The chronicle of loss is sad and shameful enough, but the grammar is terrifying.
The fact is that species don't go extinct, the way little pigs go to market; today, with some exceptions, human decisions drive species to extinction. Trees don't sever themselves cleanly at the knees and keel over; rather, humans pay other humans to go into the forest, rev up their chainsaws, and cut down the trees: the squealing saw, the crashing branches, the flying debris, the frantic cawing of crows. We--you and I, by our decisions--are causal agents in the harm done to the natural systems of the earth.
These truths aren't easy truths. It's painful, the switch from "What is happening to the world?" to "What am I doing to the world?" But this kind of truth-telling--acknowledging that we are complicit today in the degradation of the world our children will live in tomorrow--opens a door to reconciliation and renewal. If we understand that our decisions create the future, then we can imagine a different set of decisions and, thus, a different future. This shift in thinking creates the possibility of choice--commitment to a set of life-giving values that are the foundation of new communities of renewal.
My university colleague, Frank Lake, returns to his home along the Klamath River each year to join his Karok people for the dance of world renewal. He believes that the land creates the people, as a mother creates her children, and brings the rain and salmon. He also understands that people create the land. They plant willows in the lowlands and renew the meadows with prairie fires. Or people cut forests on steep slopes and rip-rap the streams--this happens, too. For better or worse, people and the land are co-creators of the future. They share the responsibility for determining what the next years will bring.
So the Karok families come together each year in their town, landing in that place from colleges and cities and ranch houses and fishing ports. It's a reconciliation, quite literally, a coming together again, a reunion of people and land. Singing and dancing, they acknowledge the human responsibility to create a world in which their children can thrive.
As soon as I got home from the airport after my long time away, I rode my bike to the Farmers' Market by the river in my town. Like the dance of world renewal in Frank's hometown, this gathering in my home town is a kind of reconciliation, a coming together again of past and future, people and the land.
The second week in June, there were buckets of flowers--yellow lilies, peonies, field daisies--and rows of tomato plants in pots. A father pushed a stroller past an abundance of lettuce, while his baby gnawed a strawberry, dribbling juice into the folds of her chin. As a fiddler played, a little boy danced, embracing a bundle of carrots. People moved slowly past oysters piled high on ice, stopping to talk with friends whose arms overflowed with leaf lettuce and sweet basil and tiny yellow potatoes just dug from the ground. Spinach in great heaps spilled over garlic sprouts under striped awnings, and behind it all, the river flashed between trees shiny with new leaves. The music, the quiet conversations, the smell of green onions and mock-orange--this world as it once was, the world as it can be again--flooded me with a joy that I am still trying to understand.

Near / Far
A second delusion would convince us that the nearby places where we live are ecologically and culturally separable from what is far away--other peoples' neighborhoods or "Nature" out on a mountaintop somewhere. This illusion allows us to believe that it is possible to safeguard one's own backyard without regard for the distant places and, the reverse, that it is possible to safeguard distant beloved places while the close-in neighborhoods collapse around us. On the contrary, the ecosystems that sustain us are linked in beautiful and complex ways to each other, to economic and social systems, and to the land. Living in this interlocking whole, we need to find our own integrity, a moral wholeness that holds us to the same standards of care for the land, no matter where we are.
Whenever I fly toward home, the plane drops below clouds soaking the foothills of the Willamette River valley where I live. I look down on a tufted landscape of clear-cuts and tree plantations. Human commerce has skinned and sectioned the hills, slicing them along political lines, property lines, fence-lines, power-lines. Lines that divide wilderness and corporate land, public land and private property, subdivision and nature reserve, nature and culture run straight and square across the curving hills.
The moral distinctions are every bit as visible on the mountainsides. Far from home, there are odd patches of wilderness ethic, where people feel a strong obligation to do no harm. Then come wide swaths of utilitarian ethic, where the land (the water, the forests, the city street, the night sky, the schoolyard, the railroad station) is treated as a commodity, and people are careless of it, or disdainful, and push it around or use it up willy-nilly. Close to home are square, green homeplaces, where people care for the land as if it were their child, cherishing it and keeping it well.
But in the earth's great systems--the hydrological cycles, the patterns of weather, the spread of disease, the migrations of birds and peoples, genetic drift, continental drift, pesticide drift, drift nets--there is no distinction between far and near. A surveyor can draw a line around a wilderness area or a subdivision, but boundaries do not hold water. When storm winds billow in, every boundary is hidden in fog that dampens stumps and forests without distinction. Carbon dioxide doesn't stay in a parking lot. Plutonium has no respect for a chain-link fence. Diseases born on the far side of the earth walk onto planes and disembark at LaGuardia or Hong Kong. And all the while, oxygen created in lowland marshes drifts toward cities on rising winds, as fresh water filtered in great forests runs downhill to the glass pitchers in the old-folks' home.
Near or far, it's all one interdependent, unfathomable thing. So the moral distinctions fall away, too. What sense does it make to live by different ethics in different places, in a world so intimately connected?
If the land is all one homeplace, then we should treat it as thoughtfully and carefully as we treat our homes. The ecological oneness of near and far requires a moral integrity as well, a vision of the possibility of living in a caring relationship with all land, of walking anywhere on earth with the same gratitude and respect.
This evening, my husband and I will walk down to the river, carrying our supper. As people gradually gather, we will sit at picnic tables by the skate-park, in the shadow of the graffiti-wall where teenagers spray-paint fierce self-portraits. Sharing binoculars, we will watch the big brown bats leave their roosts and fly off over the river to feed. We will talk about the bats, meet some people we haven't known before, be astonished and glad, and then we will walk home through warm air filtered by lichens and the lungs of strangers. We will climb into bed while the moon rises over the town, as it rose over the blowing wilderness, as it will rise over the sea. And we will fall asleep while sea-fog condenses on broad lawns and drips from the eaves of the Super 8 Motel.

Humans / Nature
Finally, we must face the most disastrous self-deception, the idea that human beings are separate from and superior to the rest of the natural world, and the equally disastrous corollary: We can destroy our habitats without destroying ourselves.
As we begin to understand instead that humans are seamlessly connected, are kin, to the natural world, then we may begin to act in caring ways toward the earth and its inhabitants. This is a matter both of pragmatic self-interest, sustaining the systems that sustain us, and of moral obligation, honoring and caring for our relations.
Jack Forbes, a Powhatan-Ren'pe scholar and a poet, pointed out how much humans are of the natural world. "You can cut off my hands," he told my students, "and I will still live. You can cut off my ears, and I will still live. Gouge out my eyes, and I will live. Cut off my legs, my hair, my nose, and I will still live. But if you cut off my air, I will die. If you take away the water, I will die. So why do I think that my hands and my eyes are more a part of me than the water and the air?"
How complicated and layered and open-ended is this relation of humans to all of natural creation, this kinship, this beautiful, bewildering family.
This kinship has moral consequences. "All ethics," wrote conservationist Aldo Leopold, "rests on a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts," a community that includes "soils, water, plants, animals, or collectively, the land." People value connections to the natural places that create and sustain us: The sudden awareness of kinship to the earth fills us with joy. This is what I felt when I flew home from so far away, landed, and made my way to the Farmers' Market, the piled carrots grown from the same soil as my neighbors and children.
Moral obligations grow from relationships. If we are of the land and if we care about and depend on our connections to it, then we ought to act in ways that nurture, enhance, and celebrate healthy webs of connection with the land and all the members of the biotic community.
Landing is what we need to do in this time and place--the sudden slowing, the jolt of reconnection, the relief of coming again into a meaningful connection with the solid earth. But that's not to say that landing is an easy thing. Landing makes me edgy as hell; I know it's the second most dangerous part of any flight, next to taking off. But it's not the fear of crash-landing that shakes me, but the fear of what I will find when I come home.
For years and years, I flew to Ohio for reunions with my family. Landing was a festive time, when all the relatives milled around the gate, and the hugs blocked the exit until a laughing guard shooed us away. But each year, fewer and fewer people met my flights. My mother became too sick to travel to the airport. Finally only my father came to meet me at the airport, pushing down the concourse in a wheelchair. And then not even he came. I climbed into a taxi that delivered me to a lonely, diminished father and a house filled with pain.
And so it is sometimes, with coming back to the land. Each year less and less remains of what we love in the land. In the town I grew up in, a parking lot for a sausage restaurant destroyed the meadow where we wove necklaces with Queen Anne's lace. The swampy place where the two rivers meet is a soccer field. An apartment complex squats where frogs used to sing. I could go on and on: What limit is there to the human ability to transmogrify the dewy, bird-graced, dapple-lighted places into hot pavement? Coming back to the land can be a time of sorrow and regret.
We know what it means to land--the final approach, the drop, the bump, the shuddering surge before the noisy slowing. After the longest time, the doors open and the air of home rushes in, carrying a sudden sense of safety and the prospect of joining again the people and places we love. We can taste on the wind the life that we are capable of living, learn again the happiness that comes from caring for people and caring for places, and accept the challenge of reconciliation, bringing together again what has been apart for a very long time.

Published in the Spring/Summer 2006 issue of Oregon Humanities.
© 2006 Oregon Council for the Humanities