I Googled our group name, and checked a listing that did not lead to "OUR" Builders of the Arks. I don't know the guy who wrote it, nor had I read any of his writings previously. But he seems to capture the essence of our mission quite well, however varied in expression it may be. Its nice to know we are not the only ones.

Society : Scott Russell Sanders

A FLEET OF ARKS


The builders of arks are those working to protect and restore wild lands.

from Resurgence issue 217


AT DAWN ONE morning in July, police showed up with bulldozers, chainsaws and guns to force a band of protesters out of a twenty-hectare wood in my hometown of Bloomington, Indiana. The sheriff and his deputies were upholding a ruling by the county council, which gave a developer the right to turn these woods into an apartment complex. The protesters were upholding the right of the woods to remain as woods, one of the last parcels of big trees left within the noose of roads encircling our city. A few protesters had lived for months up in the trees on temporary platforms, while local people took turns bringing them food and drink. The tree-sitters were arrested along with a number of their supporters, sixteen in all, and they are now awaiting trial. As I write, the trees are falling, and a private security firm guards the perimeter of the vanishing woods.

The police had the law on their side, of course, but they also had the banks, building contractors, real-estate agents, merchants, utility companies, fast-food vendors, newspaper owners, and countless other boosters that stood to make money from the development. The protesters set against that power their unarmed bodies and their unfashionable convictions. They believe there are values more important than money. They believe that red oaks and red foxes and all the creatures of the woods deserve a home. They believe that a civilised community must show restraint by leaving some land alone, to remind ourselves of the wild world on which our lives depend and to keep ourselves humble and sane.

Similar conflicts are taking place around the globe. By and large the developers are winning. Yet it's plain to many people that the Earth cannot long support the extravagant way of life so common in rich countries, nor can it support the spreading of that extravagance to poor countries. Sooner or later we'll burn up all the cheap oil, we'll pump the aquifers dry, carve up the last big forests and fish out the seas, plough up the last arable land and taint the last clean air. Endless consumption is ruinous to the planet and bound to fail. The question is not whether it will fail but when, and how the end of our spree will come - by choice, or by catastrophe.

Knowing all this, how should we act? We might shrug off the knowledge, pretend we can go on building houses, driving cars, shopping around the clock, wiping out other species, fouling the atmosphere, polluting water, and squandering soil forever. We might admit the gravity of our situation, while counting on scientists and engineers to come up with a technical fix. We might place our faith in the free market, believing it will somehow furnish a second, unspoiled Earth for our use, once the price is right. We might concede that neither economics nor technology will enable us to pursue infinite growth on a finite globe, and so decide to live it up while we can, leaving future generations to figure out how to survive on a ransacked planet. Or we might seek to live more lightly, reducing our demands on the Earth, devising or recovering simple, elegant, durable practices that could serve our descendants long after the current binge of consumption has withered away.

The first four responses to Earth's limits are by far the most visible. Those who strive to live more simply are harder to see. They don't crowd the malls or fast-food shops. Occasionally they make news by defending trees from bulldozers, but they rarely show up on talk shows or the covers of magazines. Instead, largely invisible except to one another, they go about learning the skills and mastering the tools necessary for meeting basic human needs. They grow food. They build shelters. They make clothes. They draw energy from sun and wind and wood. They get by with fewer possessions, and learn to repair the ones they have. They create much of their own entertainment, and derive pleasure from good work, human company, and the perennial show of Nature. As far as possible, they rear their children away from television and advertising. They buy as little as they can from the global economy, and instead support local economies based on co-operation, barter and sharing. They protect and restore woods, prairies, rivers and swamps, making room for wildness.

I think of these people as builders of arks, for their ways and works are vessels designed to preserve from extinction not merely our fellow creatures, as on Noah's legendary ark, but also the wisdom necessary for dwelling in place generation after generation without diminishing either the place or the planet. In their efforts to conserve skilful means and wild lands, they point the way beyond the rising flood of extinction - the ecological cataclysm precipitated by growth in human population and consumption - toward a new, durable civilisation.

THE FOREST THAT the tree-sitters were trying to save is called Brown's Woods, after the local speculator who owned it. Bill Brown - who is by all accounts a decent, prosperous man - could have sold or even donated the woods to a land trust or the city of Bloomington, but he stood to make a tidy sum by selling it to the developer, so that is what he did. The arguments for turning Brown's Woods into the Canterbury House Apartments are familiar: people need somewhere to live; people need jobs; investors deserve a return on their capital; the city must grow. We can always think of reasons for subduing land to our desires.

Whatever the arguments, the upshot is that the felling of Brown's Woods has diminished our commonwealth, and those who live here after us will inherit a grimmer, grimier place. We are not the only ones hurt. The hawks, coyotes, toads and salamanders, the butterflies and beetles will all have to leave, if they can outrun the bulldozers, and if they can find another haven anywhere near the sprawling city. The red oaks and shagbark hickories have no such chance, nor do the trout lilies and dogtooth violets, the bloodroot and chanterelles. These neighbours have no say over the future of the neighbourhood. They write no cheques, cast no votes. They have no voice in how we use the land - unless some of us speak up for them.

YOU MAY RECALL that God sends the Biblical flood in punishment for human corruption, sparing only the upright Noah, Noah's family, and a breeding pair of "every living thing" (Genesis 6:19). God instructs Noah to build an ark and take refuge there along with a male and female of each species. Then come forty days and forty nights of rain. "And all flesh died that moved upon the earth, birds, cattle, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm upon the earth, and every man; everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life". You might wonder why all the crows and crickets and other innocent breathers must drown for sins committed by humans, but the Bible does not say.

When the skies clear, Noah sends forth a dove to search for dry land. The dove comes back empty-billed on its first flight, returns bearing an olive leaf on the second flight, and after the third flight does not return at all. Reassured, Noah and his fellow passengers drift to shore and step onto solid earth. Pleased by Noah's obedience, God vows, "I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night shall not cease". It's a beautiful promise, one that softens considerably the image of the tyrant who sent the flood.

But the promise has a dark side, from which we are still suffering. For God says to Noah, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth. The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every bird of the air, upon everything that creeps on the ground and all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered. Every moving thing that lives shall be food for you; and as I gave you the green plants, I give you everything". The passage may be read as merely stating the plain truth: all beasts do live in dread of us, because we are clever enough to displace, capture, or kill every other species. Understood in this light, God's charge to Noah may be taken as a warning not to abuse our power. But the same words may also be read as justifying our utter dominion over Nature. If every animal and plant was created to serve our needs, if everything has been given into our hands, then we may use the Earth as we see fit. Read in this way, the passage becomes a licence to loot the planet.

While such a reading might appeal to the most reckless of developers, it is firmly contradicted by the rest of Noah's story. A few verses later, we find a third variation on the promise, one that clearly limits our dominion. "Behold," God tells Noah, "I establish my covenant with you and your descendants after you, and with every living creature that is with you, the birds, the cattle, and every beast of the earth with you, as many as came out of the ark. I establish my covenant with you, that never again shall all flesh be cut off by the waters of a flood, and never again shall there be a flood to destroy the earth". The God who speaks here sounds chastened, as if regretting the slaughter of so many innocent beings. This God is the creator and protector of crickets and crows, rattlesnakes and rotifers. This God cherishes all creatures, whether or not they go about on two legs, and by implication Noah is being told to cherish them as well.

The lesson we draw from the Biblical flood depends on which part of this story we embrace. One tradition blesses humans alone, conveying the whole Earth to our use; the other blesses all creatures alike, granting to each species its own right to survive and flourish. The first view instructs us to fill the Earth with our kind and to impose our will on all living things; the second instructs us to honour our fellow creatures, to show restraint in our uses of the Earth, and to take our place modestly in the household of Nature.

By and large, those who wield the levers of power in the global economy hold the first view. They insist on the sovereignty of human appetite. Nothing has value in their eyes except insofar as it can be bought or sold or otherwise used. They scorn the idea that animals or plants could have rights, even the right to survive. While they fight against protections for endangered species - mocking those who defend rare fish or birds - they support the engineering and patenting of new life forms, which can more conveniently be turned into cash. They resist every effort to preserve wilderness; they regard public land as an arena for private plunder; they reject any limits to growth; they seek to overthrow every barrier to drilling, mining, logging, road-building, polluting, or profit-making. By largely controlling the delivery of news, advertising and entertainment, they tell us what to believe and what to buy, and they force-feed us a lethal vision of the good life.

Clearly, humans could not have survived without making use of the Earth. Our ancestors hunted and fished, they gathered berries and seeds and roots, they fashioned clothing from skins and fibres, they cleared fields and planted grains, they domesticated animals, they cut down trees and dug up rocks and baked clay into bricks to build shelters, they harnessed fire and smelted ore into metal. The question is not whether we should use the Earth, but to what degree and to what end. With only stone-tipped weapons, our ancestors drove many species of large animals to extinction; with hand-tools, they felled enough trees to create deserts. Our need for prudence has grown along with the power of our technology, as stone points have given way to nuclear weapons, as bone hooks on fishing lines have given way to ocean-going trawlers pulling miles-long seines, as digging sticks have given way to draglines capable of stripping the tops from mountains in the search for coal. Likewise, as our population has grown from the few million people alive at Noah's time to the more than six billion today, so has our need for an ethic of restraint.

Noah's story offers us such an ethic in the call to protect all creatures on the ark. Those who hear this call insist that human beings are not the sovereign rulers. They insist that we belong to the community of soil, water, air, and all living things, and they seek to live in such a way as to preserve and enhance the health of this greater community. They accept limits to growth and limits to human population. Whether or not they've read the Bible, their actions are in keeping with God's command to Noah, which was to save not only those species that would be useful to humans, but everything - the creepers and crawlers, the stingers and biters, the predators and parasites. From a religious perspective, this abundance is all the handiwork of God, who loves the Creation and wishes to preserve it. From an ecological perspective, each species is vital because it embodies an irreplaceable store of knowledge accumulated over millions of years, and it interacts with other species in ways far more intricate than we could ever fathom, let alone recreate. Religion and ecology alike instruct us to honour all life. And so, recognising that the Earth has suffered great damage because of our carelessness, and realising that many other species besides our own are in danger, those who believe in the solidarity of living things have set about building arks.

A BOOK MAY be an ark, as Walden and Small Is Beautiful and The One-Straw Revolution clearly are, ferrying an ethical vision through stormy times. Organic farming, solar designing and other practices that protect the fertility and abundance of Earth may be arks. A co-op for sharing food or housing or tools might be an ark, and so might be a community chorus, an arts centre, a backyard garden, a children's science museum, a yoga class, a school - any human structure, invention or gathering that conserves the wisdom necessary for meeting our needs without despoiling the planet.

Among the builders and tenders of arks, the ones who come closest to fulfilling Noah's task are the people who work at protecting and restoring wild lands. Some devote a portion or even the whole of their own land to providing habitat for other creatures. Others join together to protect land through legal restrictions, donation, or outright purchase. In my own county, the Sycamore Land Trust has combined gifts, grants and federal and state funds to protect a 136-hectare parcel of wet forest along Beanblossom Creek, which is home to a colony of great blue herons. Every time I see one of these magisterial birds wading in a nearby lake or flying overhead with long legs trailing, I realise they might not be here at all without the Beanblossom Refuge.

Whether protected by government, trusts, or individuals, natural lands offer the last resort for other species as well as for those of our own species who crave contact with wildness. These preserves need not be large to be valuable: every scrap of ground can serve as an ark. Quite a few people in my city have dug up their lawns and planted their gardens with native flowers, shrubs and ferns. As one garden after another goes native, the roar and stink of mowers give way to the songs of birds and the smell of flowers. In summer, monarch butterflies on migration stop to nectar on blossoms, and in winter raccoons leave their tracks in the snow. All year, people walking by these exuberant yards pause on the sidewalks to gaze and listen, caught by a feral scent, a startling shape, a flash of life.

Every unsprayed garden and unkempt yard, every meadow, marsh and woods may become a reservoir for biological possibilities, keeping alive creatures who bear in their genes a wealth of evolutionary discoveries. Every such refuge may also become a reservoir for spiritual possibilities, keeping alive our connection with the land, reminding us of our origins in the green world.

Ark-builders realise, however, that nothing is gained by creating refuges in one place, if we behave in such a way as to contribute to the pillaging of land somewhere else. If we're going to build arks, we should do everything we can to avoid swelling the flood. This means living more lightly, and it means nurturing local economies, since the global economy cares neither for the fate of the Earth nor for the health of particular places. By protecting wild land, the ark-builders are helping to preserve the biological heritage - the seed stock, the diversity of species, the intricate web of fertility - that we will need to replenish the Earth after the flood recedes.

WHEN THE TREE-sitters were arrested in Brown's Woods, the sheriff was quoted in the paper as saying, "We want to do this slow and easy, so no one gets injured - so everybody has their say and can get on with their lives." What he didn't seem to grasp was that the protesters were getting on with their lives. They were expressing their love for a piece of the Earth. In this dispute over Brown's Woods, one side has its say by sending in police and bulldozers, and by throwing the protesters in jail; the other side has its say by weaving yarn among the trees and speaking plain words on behalf of the community of all beings.

If I were in the dock - as by rights I should be, given my sympathies - I would testify that we must protect the remaining wild lands, especially in our cities, because we desperately need the companionship of other species. We need them for pleasure, for instruction, for inspiration. We need them to recall us from the frenzy of our lives. We need the birds, butterflies, frogs and snakes to help us monitor the health of our home places. We need the trees and other plants to purify our water and air. We need wild lands as reminders of the natural cycles and deep time out of which we have evolved and on which we depend. These untrammelled spaces offer us relief from the hard, temporary, sometimes ugly shapes of human constructions. They serve as reservoirs from which other parts of the city and countryside might be repopulated with wild creatures. They give us a chance to glimpse the shaping intelligence in Nature, to sense the ultimate mystery from which all things rise, and to align our lives with that power.

The defenders of Brown's Woods and the other people I am calling ark-builders don't belong to a single political party. They don't follow one particular religion, or perhaps any religion at all. They don't come from one age bracket, ethnic group, or educational background. They don't obey a master plan, nor do they pretend to have a remedy for all the ills of our day. Instead, they're bound together by a certain joy and boldness in seeking to preserve the diversity of living things and the essentials of human knowledge and art. What they share is a moral vision, one informed by an understanding of ecology and a reverence for life.

Building an ark when the floodwaters are rising is not an act of despair: it's an act of hope. To build an ark is to create a space within which life in its abundance may continue. But no refuge can be sealed off entirely from the worldwide flood. Acid rain may leach it; ultraviolet radiation pouring through the ozone hole may bleach it; invasive insects or viruses may attack it; pollution from adjoining land may wash over it. In any case, no single refuge is large enough to contain the full array of species. The big predators, such as lions and wolves, need more space, as do grazing animals such as bison. And the animals that migrate, from caribou to cranes, need sanctuaries stretching across entire continents for feeding, resting, and bearing young. Even thousands of sanctuaries, blooming across our cities and countryside, will not be spacious enough if the rest of the planet becomes an industrial wasteland.

Ultimately, there will be no security for life on Earth unless we see the whole planet as an ark. We are not the captains of this vessel, although we may flatter ourselves by thinking so. We are common passengers, and yet because we are both clever and numerous, we bear a unique responsibility to do everything we can to assure that this one precious ark will stay afloat, with all the least and greatest of our fellow-travellers safely on board. o

Scott Russell Sanders is the author of eighteen books, including, most recently, Hunting for Hope, The Country of Language, and The Force of Spirit.


from Resurgence issue 217

www.resurgence.org/resurgen...rs217.htm