Dear people,
There's only one way to say this, and that's to just say it: This Friday is my last day with KBEF. It was almost exactly five years ago that I was offered this job by my friend Mark Stern, who had to know he was taking a hell of chance hiring a pissed off Klamath Project irrigator to do habitat restoration -- one year after 2001. But that's how Mark is. He very quietly does completely outrageous things, and when they work, nobody knows it was him that did it.
Now, I don't know how safe it is to say that his idea "worked" in this case. I like to think it has, but I suppose there's lots of different opinions on that. It's true that we got a lot of projects going, and we brought a lot of resources to the basin. And it's true that we helped get a lot of new and productive relationships built -- between landowners, environmentalists, agencies, the tribes, and many others. I know there are some, though, that would rather I had stayed chasing cows out in Bonanza.
I have been working on collaborative, community-based stewardship for nearly twenty years, most of them as a volunteer. Through all those years, I have been motivated by one goal, and that is to find ways to help people feel a closer connection with Creation. I figured that if people could only feel that connection -- feel it every day, all day long -- they would feel more at home on the landscape. They would not feel so lost all the time, and they could draw meaning and purpose and solace from the dirt and sun and plants and animals and water, which are quite literally the source of our lives.
This was never an "environmental" thing. It was never a "property rights" thing either. In fact it was a reaction to both of these things, and the fact that egotistical, overzealous advocates on both the right and the left had forced these categories on the rest of us, mainly because the categories made it easier for them to raise money.
There is a two-part reality that dwells deep within each of us, regardless of our political persuasion. The first part is that we need to feel that close connection with Creation. The second part is that, if we want to feel that close connection with Creation, we have to actually have a close connection with Creation.
Conservatives and Liberals are equally good at living lives that are utterly cut off from the landscapes that support them. And if we're honest, it's pretty clear that environmentalists and farmers are fairly good at it as well. Most of the farmers I know get most of their food from the big chain grocery stores, and not from the land they work. And most of the environmentalists I know spend nearly all their time indoors, climate-controlled, plugged into some electronic device, living on landscapes covered with buildings and concrete, fighting to protect distant landscapes that they have no real connection to -- except that maybe it makes them feel good for a while when they go there every so often.
A deeper connection is possible, one that is dependent upon neither the vagaries of global food distribution markets, nor the vicissitudes of environmental grantmaking. This connection does not depend on anything flimsy and impermanent like a property deed, and it doesn't depend on anything smarmy and metaphysical like the Gaia Principle. This connection depends on proximity, and it depends on chemistry.
The connection depends on proximity because you have to stay in one place long enough to learn the stories. You have to learn the very old stories, told by people who know things you don't, who were told these stories by people who are now dead and gone, who knew things that none of us do now. These kinds of stories give a profound meaning to your short little life, locating you on a timeline that runs back before anyone can remember. Also, you have to learn the new stories -- the stories that you yourself are in, the stories that root your life in a place by infusing the landscape with your experiences: You pass by some spot -- some creek or hill or field -- and some little part of you remembers what happened there, something that helped make you what you are. The spot is important because of that story. Because of that story that spot is you.
The connection also depends on chemistry -- because, as the saying goes, we are what we eat. You often hear people say that they are part of the land, and that the land is part of them. Usually this is meant in a metaphorical way, but that is not how I mean it. When you eat what comes from the land you call home, there is nothing metaphorical of mystical about it. When you eat food from your home the land is literally, chemically part of you, and you are a part of it. When something bad happens to the land, it happens to you, and when something bad happens to you, it happens to the land.
These kinds of connections are often an obligation, a burden even. But rest assured that in the end they will be a blessing -- one that no one can take away from you, unless you let them.
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Anyway, I want to make it clear that my leaving is on good terms, and that the future of KBEF's work is in the capable hands of our intelligent and passionate board of directors. The organization has grown leaps and bounds since 2002, and quite frankly I think it has grown beyond my particular set of skills. I will continue to be involved as a volunteer, which is a role I have always been more comfortable with, when it comes to this kind of work.
My family and I are in the process of building a sourdough bakery. Believe it or not, I see this as right in line with what we've been doing up to this point (the yeast will be wild, the grain will be local, and customers will be forced to endure the same sorts of rants and soliloquies you have all had to deal with in these Dispatches). It is called The Green Blade Bakery, after an old Easter hymn. The words to that hymn are at the end of this message, and I think they get across how I feel about how things have gone in the basin since the tragedies of 2001 and 2002.
My sincere thanks to all of you. I hope that I will see you again. And I hope that we will all see the day when there is no more fighting in the Klamath.
Selah,
Mike
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Green Blade Rises
Now the green blade rises from the buried grain,
Wheat that in the dark earth many years has lain;
Love lives again, that with the dead has been:
Love is come again, like wheat arising green.
In the grave they laid Him, love by hatred slain,
Thinking that He'd never wake to life again,
Laid in the earth like grain that sleeps unseen:
Love is come again, like wheat arising green.
When our hearts are saddened, grieving or in pain,
By your touch you call us back to life again;
Fields of our hearts that dead and bare have been:
Love is come again, like wheat arising green.
-- John M.C. Crum, 1928
Terry Morton
Interim Director
700 Main Street, Suite 202
Klamath Falls, OR 97601
Phone: 541-850-1717
Fax: 541-850-8001
Email: