The mission of H.O.P.E. is to turn the prow of our entropyship, the Earth, back upstream so that Earth's evolving consciousness may explore the headwaters of the Universe for billions of years to come. The work of H.O.P.E. is to make visible the larger relationships we live within - relationships that inspire visions of wonder and works of hope.

Our two daughters are finally big enough so our family can go on overnight backpacking trips. We just returned from our first one--three nights on the wilderness seashore of the Olympic Peninsula. One of my many delights was watching my daughters dancing off down the beach on their own, utterly at home within the vast powerful solitude of the wilderness. It reminded me of some Eskimo story I read about where the message a person received from the world during an adventure or vision quest was The universe is not to be feared.

We asked Zephyr what banana slugs ate and she replied, "plant carrion". I like that phrase alot.

My work has been increasingly calling out for pictures. There are some ideas, some phenomena that can be expressed so much more powerfully and deeply with the help of pictures. So we just acquired a scanner. Hopefully it will lead to more powerful works.

Reflections on "Give more than you take"

"Give more than you take" is a phrase we use with students and families at Chrysalis, our charter school, to describe a path of action we hope each member will learn to walk along. As with all paths, however, you can walk along it in either direction and following the path of "Give more than you take" can lead one away from the destination we had in mind. We had some parents who started keeping score and we had others afraid to ask for help. The phrase created a Puritan gloom for some. So here are some mid-course reflections I'm developing to share with families this upcoming school year.

It is alright to take. All life must take. The osprey takes the fish from the lake. A plant takes the nitrogen from the soil. Cells take oxygen and sugar from the blood. "Give more than you take" is not a condemnation of taking. Rather, it is a focusing on the balance between giving and taking.

In vibrant communities, what one gives back is different from what one takes. In a money-centered society, this phrase can conjure up images of debt which requires repayment in the same currency. But in the greater world of both economic and ecological transactions, what makes a community thrive is the unique gifts each member contributes. Plants take carbon dioxide; they give back oxygen. The earth would be in trouble if we required plants to give back more carbon dioxide than they take. We are best able to give in our areas of strengths or abundances. We are most likely to need and take in our areas of weaknesses or limitations. Therefore, it is very important within a community to not limit someone's "repayment" to the currency of the taking. Allow the gift to come from elsewhere. These unique differences are what creates synergies that can lead to so much more than mere "repayment in kind" can ever achieve.

Taking and receiving are two different acts. Concern about "taking" can sometimes hinder the joy of receiving which sabotages the joy of giving. Think of times when you've given the perfect gift to someone you care about. How do you wish that person to receive the gift? Certainly not with any tinge of guilt about "taking." Certainly not with a "Oh no, this is such a wonderful gift. How am I ever going to repay you?" Instead you hope the person receives the gift fully with great delight and tender feelings. It would be a tragedy if "give more than you take" prevented one from being able to receive.

Perhaps a way to distinguish "receiving" from "taking" is that in receiving, the giver initiates the interaction. In taking, the taker initiates the interaction. An example of such taking would be "My mother is sick and I need help getting the kids to school. Can you please help?" (I use this example to emphasize the naturalness and the alrightness of taking.) However, the magic that perhaps can happen is that if a community builds up enough trust within itself so that individuals know that the members give more than they take, then "taking" can blur into the joy of "receiving". The parent whose mother is sick can receive with deep appreciation and tenderness the support of the community because there is no doubt in either her mind or the minds of the givers' that in some magic way, she will return the gift in her own special way. The community will be doubly enriched by the exchange.

To summarize, "give more than you take" describes a relative balance within a community. There are two ways to maintain such a balance. A community can emphasize a minimum of taking, self-sufficiency, rugged individualism. This leads to a collection of people with few interactions, little synergy. Or a community can emphasize giving in a wonderful diversity of ways. This is the direction we see nature taking and this is the direction we hope Chrysalis moves towards.

The Big Picture

The following describes a spontaneous lecture/lesson I gave on a Chrysalis field trip that I liked because it illustrates the meta-lesson power nature study can contain. We were on an end-of-the-school year camping trip at Medicine Lake which is a lake within the caldera of a massive shield volcano. The volcano is so large that when one is playing beside the lake, it is difficult to have any awareness that one is within a volcano. This particular morning, we had taken the kids up onto the rim of the caldera. From there they could see the bigger geological structure and how the lake nestled within the lowest point of this broad caldera, the rest of which was covered with trees or lava flows. Then we left the caldera to visit some of the other geological features beyond the caldera.

We stopped at a small lake. It was while we were at this lake that I noticed the following which led me to call the students and parents together beside the lake to give a short lesson which went something like this.

"Kids, I want to give you a lesson in something we call the Big Picture. How many of you noticed signs that told you that this lake was bigger a few weeks ago? (All their hands went up because there was a ring of pollen several feet higher and many tens of yards away from the current shoreline. The Chrysalis kids are getting very good at noticing and understanding the meaning of such signs.) And how many of you noticed all of the tadpoles within the lake? (Again all of the hands went up because the tadpoles were abundant and several kids had been engaged in trying to catch them.)

"Now, I want to show you something." I walked them to a tiny pool two feet across that was 10 yards from the shoreline. There were about 20 tadpoles swimming in the pool. "When the water was as high as the ring of pollen, this tiny pool was part of the lake. But as the lake level dropped, these tadpoles became cut off from the main lake. Now I want to show you what is going to happen to these tadpoles within a few days." I then led the group to another tiny pool I had discovered. This pool was a bit further from the shoreline and was now only a few inches across. There were about 10 dead tadpoles in the pool.

"What happened here?" The kids could see that the tadpoles had become trapped in a pool that had dried up to the point where the tadpoles had died. "We people standing here can see the big lake over there and see these tiny pools around it and understand the process by which these tadpoles became trapped. We can see the big picture. These tadpoles could not see the big picture. They could just see the water right around them. We can see where they should have gone. Being able to see the big picture can help one survive, can help one act more wisely.

"This morning when we walked up onto the rim, you were able to see the big volcano. You got to see the bigger picture that the lake and our campground fit within. Before then, we were like the tadpoles, unable to see how the world right around us fit into something bigger. I want these tadpoles to remind you that you are always surrounded by things bigger than you can see right around you and that learning to see that bigger picture can help you live a better life."

One of the spontaneous consequences of this lesson is that several children then spent the next ten minutes walking around the lake looking for pool-stranded tadpoles and transferring them to the lake.

Not everyone understood this lesson, especially the younger children. But the lesson will be repeated with other examples. Meta-lessons require many examples before they take on the true proportions of meta-lessons. The power of nature study is that it brings people into repeated contacts with specific examples of such lessons.

The Value of Wilderness

Reading a book about Wallace Stegner got me thinking about reasons for preserving wilderness. Stegner is the author who, in writing in 1960 in support for a congressional wilderness act, said "We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope."

What is wilderness and why should we preserve it? In some ways, the dialogue has moved beyond the terms Stegner was working with. Wilderness was seen as areas absent of human influence. And yet, as we grow increasingly aware of how life, including humans, provide ecological service and are an integral shaping (as well as shaped) part of the land, the idea of wilderness as apart from man needs to evolve further.

Anyway, as I think about preserving wilderness, two reasons for preservation keep coming to mind. These two are entirely human-centered and there are several other, more profound reasons for preserving wilderness. But here are two more. The first is as a warning track. Major league baseball fields have warning tracks. This change of ground texture in the outfield signals an outfielder who is running hard to catch a fly ball that he is about to crash into the wall. The warning track helps prevent full-speed collisions with the wall.

Similarly, setting aside wilderness creates warning tracks for our culture. Twenty or thirty years ago, these areas were set off-limits to resource extraction. And now we are engaged in regional and national debates about permitting economic development of these areas. We must not allow the debate to dwindle to a "jobs vs. owls" type debate. Questions like the following should focus the discussion.

If we preserve the sanctity of the wilderness areas, what are all of the horrible bad things that will happen to our culture? What are the reasons these horrible bad things will happen? Once answers are fully fleshed out to these questions, we then need to ask, "Will the violation of the wilderness areas eliminate or simply postpone these horrible bad things?" In virtually every case I know about, the proponents of harvesting make no pretense that harvesting will solve the problems that they say are developing due to wilderness preservation. Logging old growth forests won't create thousands of secure logging jobs. It will simply create jobs for another 5 or 10 years.

Then the real question needs to be raised. If destroying this limited resource of wilderness will only postpone the onset of purported problems, when should we confront and solve the purported problem? It is better to confront it now when we still have the flexibility and wealth of wilderness areas, when human population and national debt are less than they will be rather than waiting to confront it when we have stripped away all reserves, all buffers. So "No, we will not desecrate these wilderness areas. Instead we will begin facing the issues of sustainability that we must eventually face."

This is the value of wilderness as a warning track. It forces us as a society to discuss issues of sustainability several years, or hopefully decades, before we otherwise would. Some developers complain that the environmental movement slows down development, makes it harder. That is precisely the point. It is the slowing down of the outfielder before they run full-tilt into the wall.

The second value of wilderness resonates with Stegner's phrase, "the geography of hope". A great lesson I believe can be drawn from nature (the point I try developing in Shifting ) is that there is a direction to the world (related to the Second Law) that has both scientific and ethical validity and ramifications. We have lost touch with this because our culture has surrounded itself with land that is running down. Living within such a landscape creates a consciousness that limits one's visions of hope. A value of wilderness is to allow us to visit and experience parts of the world in which the landscape and the lives within it are co-evolving along an upward spiral. It is possible; life can interact with its environment in a way that increases possibilities. If a lupine or a beaver or an earthworm can achieve such a relationship, then we as mobile consciousness with vision to see the needs and opposable thumbs to do the work, should easily be able to achieve similar relationships with the world around us.

A favorite example of wilderness landscapes is an alluvial fan. Alluvial fans form where a steep stream slows down and drops some of the sediment it is carrying. This deposition raises the stream bed, forcing the water to flow somewhere else. But flowing in the new place leads to deposition which raises that part which pushes the water onto another area of the alluvial fan. Back and forth the stream plays, building the alluvial fan wider and higher until much of the streamflow entering the fan sinks into the fan. A mature alluvial fan is a complex structure composed of thousands of one-inch layers. An intact alluvial fan resonates with water like a tight drum, like a ripe watermelon. Alluvial fans are places where life grows in abundance. The water is held right there beneath the surface.

But most alluvial fans have been slashed because of human exploitation in the headwaters. Runoff now flows with a sharper, stronger pulse that digs into the alluvial fan's layers rather than adding to them. The gouge drains some of the groundwater and the structure no longer thumps like a well-tuned drum. Some of the magic has drained away. Life dwindles because the water is no longer quite as close to the surface. People can't experience what is possible, what once actually existed. But if we set aside some areas as wilderness where we can go to visit areas moving with full mature strength in the upward direction, then our spirits can be opened to the possibilities. This is one of the ways wilderness becomes part of "the geography of hope."
 

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© 1997, Paul Krafel, P.O. Box 609, Cottonwood, CA 96022-0609
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