Blackle

Sarah Saxon is a senior at Roland Park Country School working as a BJEN intern this spring. She authored this guest entry.

Recently someone told me about a new website called Blackle. The site was created by Heap Media, and it is powered by Google. Basically, it is a more sustainable form of Google. Why? You might ask. Well, instead of having a screen that is all white with black writing, the screen is all black with white writing. This is more sustainable because it conserves energy. According to Roberson et al., “Image displayed is primarily a function of the user's color settings and desktop graphics, as well as the color and size of open application windows; a given monitor requires more power to display a white (or light) screen than a black (or dark) screen”. The amount of energy conserved can be seen on the site’s main page. It says that presently, 1,256,001.441 Watt hours have been saved. Although this is a small amount, it is one step in a larger action to reduce energy use.

What you can do to help:
Heap Media claims that Blackle was created in order “to remind us all of the need to take small steps in our everyday lives to save energy”. Heap Media encourages users to set Blackle as their home page. “This way every time you load your internet browser you will save a little bit of energy”.

In order to learn more about Blackle, you can go to the website http://www.blackle.com/ and click the “About Blackle” button on the bottom of the page. You can also find out more about how to save energy and stay updated about the site.

the best things in life are free

Dr. Mark Jacobson, a Stanford University professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering has recently published a paper that shows that many of our most politically fair-haired energy solutions (clean coal, ethanol, biomass, nuclear, etc) are actually the most expensive and the most destructive to use. Rather, he argues, wind and concentrated solar power are the best options before us today and can go a long way to supplying the doubling of the power demand that is expected by 2030. Even transportation energy, if most of our fleet goes electric.

Read more about his findings and, if you are scientifically-minded or otherwise intellectually intrepid, follow the link on the right of the stanford.edu page to read Dr. Jacobson's article in Energy and Environmental Science (First published on the web 1st December 2008).

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2009/january7/power-010709.html

extended producer responsibility

The way things work today is this:

A manufacturer creates and markets a product.

When things are working right, the manufacturer is responsible for the waste that comes out of the factory, either through chimneys or sludge or pipes.

But the manufacturer is likely not to be held responsible for much of what happens before and all of what happens after that:

where the packaging goes; how the product is disposed of; the environmental harm or costs of disposal of their products; or the proper education of the seller or consumer regarding the future handling and disposal of the product.

Instead, local governments pick up the tab for disposal; hazardous waste management; green clean up; public education. Without financial incentives or implications for the design and proper disposal of their products, it is no wonder that the manufacturing industry is slow to green their ways.

Enter Extended Producer Responsibility.

Here is the way it is explained on the Waste to Wealth website:

"Extended producer responsibility (EPR), based on the "polluter pays" principle, entails making manufacturers responsible for the entire lifecycle of the products and packaging they produce. One aim of EPR policies is to internalize the environmental costs of products into their price. Another is to shift the economic burden of managing products that have reached the end of their useful life from local government and taxpayers to product producers and consumers.

The concept of EPR was first formally introduced in Sweden by Thomas Lindhqvist in a 1990 report to the Swedish Ministry of the Environment."

This is the way of the future. Researchers, material scientists, producers, manufacturers even distributors all need to be part of the solution of sustainability. Everyone along the economic food chain is responsible for the environmental impact of the products that they design, manufacture, and sell. That way, real costs can be embedded in the product costs, and consumers will do their part in buying, and disposing of things, responsibly as well.

Check out this short and enlightening explanation of EPR:

http://www.ilsr.org/recycling/epr/index.html

revolution in time

In his book called, A Revolution in Time, David Landes writes about the impact, and I would add imperialism, even a touch of tyranny, of the household clock. "A chamber clock or watch is something very different [from the public clocks displayed on clocktowers in village squares and official buildings that were only visible when you passed by, and only heard when they chimed at intervals. The household clock, in comparison, provides] an ever visible, ever audible companion and monitor. A turning hand, specifically a minute hand (the hour hand turns so slowly as to seem still), is a measure of time used, time spent, time wasted, time lost. As such it was a prod and key to personal achievement and productivity."

Our lives, our attitudes toward time, and thus toward how we measured, spent and filled or squandered time, changed with this new, quotidian technology of personal clocks. (And all the more so watches. For even if we could not escape the constancy of measuring ourselves against time at home, without a watch, we could hope for a brief reprieve when we were out and about.)

Today, it is almost impossible to imagine living beyond the limits of finely calibrated time. Vacations sometimes allow that - unless of course we are on tours which need to adhere to their schedule; or make appointments or reservations or other commitments that require us to be aware of the time.

Perhaps that is why childhood is so large, so endless. Perhaps it is because children tell time by the sun, by the amount of light left in the day to play outside. Or until they tire and say enough. They are never working toward a pre-determined terminal moment. Adults always measure time, wondering at the start how much time there is until the finish. I remember times as a child playing games or reading or listening to music so intently that I did not notice the passing of time, did not look at a clock to say, only fifteen more minutes until I have to stop. To fill those fifteen minutes without a sense of end, without an awareness of their limitation, made those fifteen minutes part of eternity. To be aware of counting down may make the moments more precious, true, but it also makes them tenser, and shorter.

Almost everything electronic we own today has a clock in it - both those we can see and those we can't. Modernity is swathed in the precision of time-keeping. Technology doesn't just create stuff. It also manufactures culture, and therefore refashions our spirits.

Shabbat and the holidays are the closest things we have today that help us erase the tyranny of timekeeping brought upon us by our brilliance in technology, and return us to the awareness of universal time. (The necessity to run services on schedule is a most unfortunate conundrum that breaks the flow and spirit of these days expansive immersion in time.)

Their imposition on the flow of our work, especially when they fall mid-week, their disruption of our daily routine, and their re-orientating our approach to the ways of timekeeping and the pace and flow of our days, may just be one of their greatest gifts.

Time, and our experience of it, are as much a part of our environment as the trees, the water and the air. While all these things are "out there," independent of us, we experience them through the lens, stuff and attitude of our culture. True, we must choose to use our time well. Both Judaism and modernity call us to do that. But we must also learn to live it deeply, to measure it by the heavens, and not just by the clock. To imagine each moment a member of eternity and not a commodity that comes, and is then consumed.

Paradoxically enough, it is our calendar, the Jewish calendar, that today can best remind us of the timelessness of time. Tomorrow is Sukkot - when we are cast back to the Exodus, the settlement of the land of Israel, the bountiful harvest, the past celebrations of the holiday and the menu planning for our meals this coming week. Time coming together in a moment of eternity, around the dinner table, under the heavens, with the smell of fallen leaves and pine trees filling the air.

Have a joyous sukkot.

Telling the story

"One of the most important needs a comprehensible universe meets is the ability to project the future."

I came across this line in a book by Jeffrey Fager entitled, Land Tenure and the Biblical Jubilee. And suddenly, it all became clear. Sort of. At least some of it did.

Amidst discussions about the origins and meaning of biblical land reform, Fager gives us a refresher course on the necessity of stories. Humans need to make sense of the world, to set all of life's chaotic elements in order, to recall a usable past, and through that, build a vision of an irresistible tomorrow.

"Once a universe is understood, it is possible to know how to live in it because there is a continuity between the descriptive (what is) and the normative (what ought to be)." Bottom line, we cannot live without stories linking what we choose to do today with where we want to be tomorrow.

That is what we seek from our culture. That is what we demand from our religions.

But that is what is so scary about today's non-green behaviors. That is what is so scary about a story captured by the catchy refrain: "Drill, baby, drill". It is a story all about now; it is a story all about me. And it will blithely, crushingly, burden our children of tomorrow

Once upon a time, even as recently as 50 years ago, we had a vision of a future that outlived our meager lives. Time was measured in generations, and generations were measured in decades, not months; success was measured in how much we saved, not spent; our worth was measured by what we gave away, not what we earned; business-folk cared as much about the quality of their product as they did about their stock portfolio.

But with modernity came quarterly earnings reports, global markets, digital clocks. Time was measured in now; eternity is the time between the pressing of the enter button and the repainting of the screen.


Which is to say, we have fallen pray to the moment, the now. Society has failed to give us a vision that can shine past the shelf-life of the food in our refrigerator, much less excite the rest of our tomorrows.

Why not drill now, even though at best it is a quick fix which will leave all humanity in an even deeper hole, with increased environmental, energy and financial distress, but it also eases the tax burden of Alaskan citizens? Why worry now about running out of continental shelves and Alaskan wildlife refuges to dig in and destroy? That is, oh, ten years away. Why not just keep doing what we have always been doing?

Why worry about what happens when we continue to pursue centralized power from materials ripped and sucked and blasted out of the ground, materials that enrich the owners and stakeholders but continue to destabilize the atmosphere and our oceans, and through continued centralization put millions of individuals at risk from hurricanes and other natural disasters, technological glitches and those seeking mischief or destruction?

Why worry about what about green house gas emissions that will continue to degrade our slender slip of breathable atmosphere so that whatever our children seek to do may be for naught anyway for the climate change dice will have been thrown? That is not now.

That is the failure of our current society; the failure to tell us a story about the future that includes the world the day after tomorrow. Especially when that day looks mighty bleak right now.

We used to be able to see further. We used to be able to care more. But the story of buying now and paying later has been so successful. The problem is, few people read far enough to see what happens "later."

The mortgage crisis gives us a glimpse. And with yet another venerable financial firm biting the dust, the sight is far from pretty. Perhaps now we can get people to turn the page and see what later will look in a selfish, "Drill, baby, drill" world. As none other than T. Boone Pickens is telling us: America possesses 3% of the world oil reserves yet uses 25% of the world's oil. You don't have to be a math genius to realize that all the drilling in Alaska and off the coasts will not give us the oil we crave.

It is time for environmentalists, and Jews who care, to speak another story, an irresistible story that we can offer to offset the "Drill here, drill now, no change" narrative. We can't win through lawsuits, or cost savings, or convenience alone. Compelling stories aren't always cheap, and they aren't always convenient. But they fill the soul, and they allow our children to look back, and bless us.

Let's work on crafting, and telling, that story.

The Art and Soul of Staying at Home IV

Clearly, avoiding travel during these days of pumped up fuel prices is on everyone's mind. I just read about "stay-cations" - places to go when holidaying at home. The zeitgeist is at work again.

I thought about this while listening to a captivating story on NPR about Marta Becket. Marta is 83, a former dancer New York-quality professional dancer who stumbled onto an abandoned theater on the outskirts of Death Valley Junction over 40 years ago. Peering into the darkened theater through a hole in the door, Marta says she felt like she was looking at the other half of herself. This place belonged to her and she belonged to it. She and her husband settled there and got to work rehabilitating this personal Shangri-La.

For forty years Marta has performed on the stage of the theater she named the Armagosa Opera House. Recruiting an audience in such a remote and sparsely populated area was, shall we say, difficult. But no matter who showed up (or didn't), Marta performed.

One of the most engaging aspects of the story is how Marta buoyed herself through the slow, isolated times and created the audience she needed to keep her going. Looking around one day at the bare white walls, Marta determined to paint an appreciative gallery of spellbound spectators. For four years, she populated the walls of the theater with a richly designed and ornately executed Spanish renaissance congregation: a king and queen front and center; courtiers and commoners, lovers and drunkards, priests and nuns. When she finished that, she tackled the ceiling, with cherubs and doves.

I thought about this as I opened my vacuous, monochromatic closet door this morning. Now, while I do not have the skills with which Marta Becket is graced, I do have one valuable commodity - lots of blank doors. What if, during this time of staying at home, I threw my inhibitions to the wind, researched landscapes of the hills of Jerusalem, the Judean desert, Sefad; recreated the interiors of 18th century shtetl homes, and surrounded myself with leaves, trees and spices from the Bible? What if the vacant canvas leading into the closets of my home were transformed into portals of our imagination. Pigment paradise.

I will definitely need some help pursuing this. And I will be grateful to whitewash that can, as a last resort, cover up all my artistic sins. But what an awesome memento of staying at home these magical murals would be.

The Trees and the Forest

Part of the joy of engaging in environmental work is the extended field of literature it calls me to visit. Today, I am reading Forests: the shadow of civilization by Robert Pogue Harrison.

I was pulled to it for two reasons.

One, I am somewhat ashamed to say, is my small delight in one-word titles. All of my book titles are a bit clumsy and long, with fistfuls of letters and words to get the point across. Books with one word titles like: Wood. Salt. Coal. (all of which I have read) seem to promise a no-nonsense, clear-minded adventure into the arcane history of a most common topic. So it is with Forests. Only, the writing here is somewhat dense and the material handled is high or arcane literature. Not easy going. Still and all, it is a rewarding read.


Two, I am eager to explore the rich use of tree as religious object and image in Judaism - and this was a good start, to get to know how other cultures saw trees and how others writers wrote about those cultures.

Harrison dives deep here and on page 63 mines an essential but unmarketable and largely unnoticed value of forests. Forests are not just a collection of trees. Forests are places where one tree plus one tree plus one tree equals darkness before sunset; limited visibility; a place where one gets turned around; loss of way; strange noises; and dangers of all kinds. Forests are wooded wilderness. As such, they are outside the bounds and the rules of civilization.

As Harrison says: "When we look into the forests... we see a strange reflection of the order to which they remained external. [This means that the forest is like a bizarre mirror, distorting the image of the civilization it bounds.] From this external perspective the institutional world reveals its absurdity, or corruption, or contradictions, or arbitrariness, or even its virtues. But one way or another it [the institutional world] reveals something essential about itself which often remains invisible or inaccessible to the internal perspective."

In other words, we cannot see ourselves clearly unless we look at ourselves through the mirror of a forest. It tosses our ordered world around til the fluff is blown away and the essence all drops to the bottom. We project onto the forest the qualities of civilization we seek to banish, or that we seek but cannot find.

This is a powerful argument for the intangible values of nature. Along with the spiritual healing that we find when following in the trail of a deer, and along with the refuge, solitude and protection we can feel when held snugly in the midst of a wooded thicket, the forests graciously show us for what we really are.

The gifts of nature for us individually and collectively continue to unfold. And my fascination with trees, with knowing them and planting them and experiencing them, just keeps growing. Go ahead, give it a try.

Take a walk in the forest. Plant a tree with your own hands in your yard or apartment. Learn one name of a tree every week. It will do us all good.

Oh, what I neglected to mention in my pre-Shavuot post, is that the rabbis taught us that the health of the upcoming harvest of the trees is determined, judged in its word, on Shavuot. [Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 1:2] Tu B'shvat may be the day all the trees turn one year older. But it is on Shavuot that the trees' produce is judged. Based on what, the mishnah doesn't say.

A blessing for turning on the light

I just bumped into Paul Hawken's book, The Ecology of Commerce. And I am just on page 21 - so you may know something about this book that I don't. But I have been struck with the passion, data and hutzpah of the book already.

He takes on the myth of America's business ethic - saying that "The ultimate purpose of business is not, or should not be, simply to make money... The promise of business is to increase the general well-being of humankind through service, a creative invention and ethical philosophy."

That is not the general way we hear people talking about business. Hawken argues that in order to live in a "green" society, we must not only ask how do we save the environment, we must also ask, how do we save business, for it is only when business can thrive while being green will we all prosper.

I will let you now if the book continues to inspire or takes a turn somewhere. But the datum that caused me to write this entry is the following:

According to Hawken, in 1993 - the year the book was written - humankind consumed in ONE DAY the amount of energy it took the young earth 10,000 days to create. That is, in 24 hours, we consume 27 years-worth of converted sunlight. And that was back then. Imagine the rate of consumption now.

No matter how big and how old the earth is, that rate of consumption is clearly way out of whack with a sustainable society.

That's it. I just wanted to share that stunning datum. And suggest:

If we make a blessing every time we eat - thanking God for the energy that has gone into the sowing and growing and harvesting and threshing and kneading and baking, surely there ought to be a blessing every time we turn on the light.

living fences, furniture and buildings

This is so amazing, imaginative and suggestive of the miracles that lie unseen before us. Enjoy the visions it conjures up. (from the JCPA Insider)

Israel's Plantware Creates Living Urban Jungle.A group of young Israeli idealists have found a way to manipulate roots from trees such as figs, and to grow them into useful structures. The aim is to one day build the structures of homes from living trees - and save the planet at the same time. Currently the company has taken its patented methods and built park benches, playgrounds, streetlamps and gates - all from trees. To read more and see video footage visit Israel21c.org.

gender, service and the economy

WYPR's business commentator, Anirban Basu, reported today that there were really two economies in this recession: one for men and one for women. That is, whereas men have lost 700,000 jobs recently, women have gained 300,000 jobs. He goes on to explain that the jobs most vulnerable now are the ones men traditionally occupy: manufacturing and construction, while the job sectors that are growing are the ones that women traditionally occupy: teaching and healthcare.

While Basu couched this insight in gender terms, it is so much more than that. It is, if we allow it to be, the opening insight into the necessity of redesigning the definition of a vibrant economy. That is, instead of building a successful economy on paying more and more people to make more and more things (and encouraging the consumer to buy more and more things), we can build an economy on paying more and more people to do more and more things, like service -oriented jobs, healthcare, homecare, childcare, eldercare, teaching, coaching, protecting, training.

Maryland began to experiment with this changed view of the economy when it suggested taxing computer services. I am not here engaging in the debate of whether that particular effort was right or wrong. What I want to stress is that it opened up for the general public an awareness, whether conscious or not, that services are also a "good" produced by society. Why, it seemed to ask us, do we distinguish between the two in the tax code? If we tax the one (goods), would we not tax the other (services)?

(I am sure this is a topic that has been hotly debated among economists for a while. And I would bet this sounds naive to the finance cognoscenti. Indeed, I would love to hear economists weigh in on this subject and teach the rest of us benighted folks what the state-of-the-art thinking is on the status of goods and services. But I write as one of the public - not an economist.)

Truth be told, I never thought of that before. I never wondered why we pay 6% more for the stuff we buy but not for the things people do for us. The divide between things we buy, which incur a sales tax, versus services we buy, which do not, create a psychological divide in our mind between the two. Again, I am not arguing about whether sales taxes are good, or whether we should tax services. I am only arguing that the way we structure our tax system indicates different attitudes toward services and goods, and thus the economic value we attach to them.

The good news about Basu's report is that gender issues are now so mainstream that one cannot look at society without viewing it through a gender-sensitive lens. The challenge we learn with Basu's report is that we have to now make the environment as ever-present and sensitive a lens through which to read economic trends. For with such a green lens on, we can read these same figures as trending toward a healthier, more futuristic, sustainable economy - reducing our reliance on the creation of unnecessary "stuff" to keep the economic wheels greased (thereby bringing manufacturing more in line with the needs and rhythms of the earth) and increasing our output and investment in service, a marketplace with never-ending demand.

the story behind the things we buy

If you are looking for a quick way to learn more about the way things are made, and discarded, like cosmetics, plastic bags, chocolate, how they affect the environment and what we can do to lower our waste and increase our health, check out Good Stuff? - A Behind-the-Scenes Guide to the Things We Buy.
(http://www.worldwatch.org/taxonomy/term/44)

Published by the World Watch Organization, it is a free download-able booklet which devotes one page to each of its 24 categories.

Quick and easy to read, it satisfies the first flush of curiosity about the things in our everyday life that we often don't give enough thought to.

green cleaning

Sunday, BJEN sponsored a 'green cleaning for your home' gathering with Loren Lavoy, owner of Green Clean (www.greencleanusa.org) to learn about safe ways to clean one's home.

Many to most home cleaning products contain dangerous chemicals that leave a residue of toxins in the home, on surfaces and in the air even long after their smell dissipates. Not good for adults and certainly not good for kids and pets.

What was even more surprising, although pleasantly so, was that products exist that can get our homes clean without making us sick.

First of all, remember that plain soap and water clean the best. No need, and no benefit, of antibacterial soaps most of the time. Indeed, we are all better off leaving antibacterial additives to hospitals and the truly vulnerable so we do not dilute the medicine's effectiveness and do not deprive our immune systems from ramping up to full speed.

Second of all, grandma knew best. Take all the products you have for cleaning the kitchen, floors, sinks, bathtubs, toilets, etc., use them up and then buy the following:

Borax, Bonami, a good scrubbing sponge, hydrogen peroxide, baking soda and vinegar.

All of these can be found in your local grocery store. No need to shop at a specialty outlet.

With these bio-friendly, inexpensive, and safe products, you can clean just about everything in your homes, as good as and often better than the fancy, expensive and unhealthy products. And they take up a lot less space in your closet.

Check out, for example, www.grist.org and its review of green cleansers. A truthful and helpful real life sampling of possible products and their effectiveness.

Two helpful hints when you go green:

1) These cleaners take a little longer to work. The hint from Loren: apply them to one surface, then the next, then the next, and so on. THEN go back with your mildly wet, gentle scrubber and rub, and then take your clean rag and wipe things off. You will get a clean and shiny surface you can be proud of.

2) They don't smell, and some people feel if it doesn't smell clean it can't be clean. Solution: buy essential oils and place the wicking sticks in them to slowly release great scents into your room. And if you vacuum with a bag, instead of a bagless, cleaner, place a drop or two of lavender on the bag before you vacuum. It will leave a gentle fragrance everywhere you clean.

blessing of constancy

I am in West Virginia, on a sudden but modest hill surrounded by two mountain ranges. To get to this cabin you drive west on Route 70, meander a ways, turn off the paved road by the large house forever in the process of construction, rising from the growing graveyard of contrivances that once carried people but now rely on people to carry them, drive a while on dirt and stones until you arrive at the “driveway.” If any regulatory agency set standards for driveways here, this would not be a driveway. But in the wilds of WV, almost anything goes. Still, as citified folk approach, our first thoughts are: Please Gd, let that not be the “driveway.” Then we think: Shouldn’t this thing have a chain-belt to pull me up, kind of like a roller-coaster? The trick is to get a running start so you have enough momentum when the traction gets a little light.

To the east of the house is mountain; to the west of the house is mountain. Sunlight comes here later and leaves earlier than it does for our neighbors on the heights. The view is not much. The house is surrounded by trees, a bit thin in the winter but just the right density in the summer. Still and all, if you want a view, this is not the place to go. It reminds me of the Midwestern quip: An easterner was visiting a stark prairie town, with not a tree in sight. Engaged in conversation with a native plainsman, the easterner, clearly unsettled by the unbroken vastness of the prairie, finally asked: “Don’t you miss trees?” The plainsman snorted: “Trees? Who wants trees? They block the view.”

You either like this cabin or you don’t, depending on whether you think the trees are the view or are blocking the view.

But the real reason I am writing this is to share a quote I read here. I recently bumped into the nature writings of Susan Fenimore Cooper, the daughter of novelist James Fenimore Cooper. She was gentle, easy writer with a love of the out of doors. Her book, Rural Hours, is an accessible naturalist’s diary of the seasons of the year in Cooperstown, NY. She occasionally culls lessons from physical nature to human nature, and sometimes the other way around. The following is an observation that works well in both worlds:

“How pleasant it is to meet the same flowers year after year! If the blossoms were liable to change – if they were to become capricious and irregular – they might excite more surprise, more curiosity, but we should love them less… Whatever your roving fancies may say, there is a virtue in constancy which has a reward above all that fickle change can bestow…” (p. 29)

We love the extraordinary in nature. We travel to see the majesty of Niagara Falls and the Grand Canyon, the stunning beauty of the orchid. But it is the irises that bloom in our garden every spring; the snowfall that cheers us in the midst of winter; the luscious smell of warm summer rains; the knowledge that the seasons will once again come around so that we can plant vegetables and harvest them in due time; watch the flowers bloom and be greeted by the bees and butterflies lured by their fragrance, that calm our restless spirits.

And it is with people as it is with nature. We love the exotic, the glamorous, the new, the extraordinary. But we thrive on the constancy of a mother’s hug, the familiar repertoire of family recipes, the recognition of who sits where, and the anticipation of family traditions. Even as we need change, we need reliability, both in the seasons of nature and the seasons of our lives. But what was once a given is now in jeopardy. There is displacement and disruption in both these realms. The hope is that our work and awareness and skills in one arena will spill over to our work and awareness and skills in the other. Not too far-fetched a hope. And not beyond our the tasks of our daily lives.

why I like my house

In "The Symbolism of Habitat," a book that is both slendor and fascinating (the best of all worlds!), Jay Appleton teaches me why I like my house. Landscapes, he explains, whether natural or built, shape our emotions as well as our space. They entice us or repel us; draw us in or keep us out; enchant us, lure us and scare us, often all at the same time.

Specifically, he speaks of views and symbols that evoke feelings of prospect (the future - with its promises and hopes, and titillation of adventure) and refuge (safety, comfort and the reassurance of home).

As you might imagine, distant horizons, mountain ranges and valleys, even rivers or trails rounding a bend, offer us a sense of prospect. The open space between us and them, the remove from our daily burdens that they suggest, a new world beyond our wildest imagination, invite us, sometimes even taunt us, with their beckoning.

On the other hand, we are drawn to castles. Towers on lofty heights, citadels, peaks, high roofs that stand defiant above the surrounding landscape. They promise physical superiority, strong walls around us, security against an onslaught of attacks from the outside.

Cozy houses capture this sense of safety wrapped up in a nested space. With their well-fitting roofs slung comfortably low on solid foundations, a wreath or knocker on their well-worn doors, they symbolize the place we want to be. (An enchanting treatment of such buildings, and the disappearing community they create, can be found in the charming, little-known book: Passing the Time in Ballymenone, by Henry H. Glassie.)

My house, Appleton led me to understand, has both prospect and refuge built into its silhouette. The entryway, the most vulnerable place in any house, rises 15 feet from floor to roof. I never understood why we needed this height - it certainly makes changing the lightbulbs in the foyer a nuisance. But in view of Appleton's book, I see that it is reminiscent of European castles, citadels on the hill, projecting their impenetrability and might, and protecting those within from unwelcome incursions from without.

And as the entryway swaggers, our rooms embrace. They offer comfort and healing from within. So - we have rooms with low ceilings, echoed in the roof-lines above. Our rooms offer hearthy feelings in earthy tones, with overstuffed chairs that are large enough to curl up in, yet small enough to feel swaddled and cuddled, coddled and protected.

Learning to read the symbolism of the landscape is like learning a second language. Or better, a language we have been speaking all along, without knowing it. Reading landscapes helps us better understand our reactions to the spaces around us, be they streetscapes, malls or the rooms of our own home. And it helps us to better inform our city planners how to build places that nourish our spirits, and strengthen community, in a world where sharing well is becoming increasingly important.

wallace stegner

If you have not already been introduced to this poet activist, look him up as soon as you can. He is literary, wise, historical, and political all bound up in poetic passion that makes you read slowly and hesitate to turn too many pages lest you get to the end too quickly.

He was born in early years of the 20th century and carried the yoke of early environmentalism when that was a lonely burden to bear.

He reminds us of the great swath of land that made us, that inspired us just by being there. West was more than a direction for Americans - it was the frontier, the place of opportunity, escape, freedom, chance, choice that we had safe in the bank whether we ever needed it and used it or not. It was a calling. And we all hear it still.

There was a carelessness we thought we could afford here, for there was always an out-there waiting for us, by our right.

And while we still act that way, and that sense of possibilities still fires the American spirit, we have long passed the time when the land can afford all the misuse, disregard and hope that we put on it.

Stegner speaks of all this in ways that do not fail to move us - there are times it is like reading psalms, and the psalmist's paeans to nature, only in the landscape we know as America instead of the sacred land of Israel. But how better to remind us of all the earth's sacredness?

POGO on the environment

My husband sent me this touching and telling tidbit of information:

The famous Pogo saying: "we have met the enemy and he is us" was created for the original Earth Day Pogo comic strip, bemoaning pollution, trash and the general disregard for the natural environment.

To see the strip, go to Wikipedia, search for Pogo, and click on entry number #4, "We have met the enemy..."

Words of wisdom from an irresistible and irrepressible possum.

Thank you, Walt Kelly.