About a month ago, right before my cross-country move, I participated in a themed residency at PLAYA in Summer Lake, Oregon.  The residency included several artists, writers, and scientists of varying genres —botanists, essayists, environmental scientists, poets, photographers, and other visual artists— whose work addresses, in some manner, important environmental issues. I spent a glorious two weeks on the beautiful grounds of PLAYA among other creative minds, other environmentally focused creative minds, which felt a little like meeting a wonderful family that you didn’t know you had (read about the other fabulous PLAYA residents here).

PLAYA’s art + ecology series is specifically designed to nurture the collaboration between science and the arts, in an effort to both inform artistic work with current scientific information, and to increase the accessibility of scientific discourse by using humanities to engage the senses and emotions. At the end of the residency, we residents were asked to share excerpts of our work at PLAYA’s “Beyond Creating: A Climate of Change” event, the second in their series of conversations “between artists, writers, and scientists about environmental issues affecting mankind and other species.”

When Deborah Ford, Executive Director of PLAYA, first invited PLAYA residents to participating in this discussion, the question we were asked to consider was: What is at the heart of my work? —Which is exactly what I am re-examining today.

I was first trained as a scientist. I have degrees in geology and environmental science, and spent many years working as a regulator in the technical environmental sector: permitting of industrial and municipal wastewater discharges to be protective of ground water resources, and overseeing the investigation and remediation of contaminated sites. So I bring this knowledge and experience to my work — the science. But as a writer, I not only want to translate the science of my subject matter and make the technical information accessible, I want to MOVE people. I want to engage my readers on an emotional level, so they might be motivated to change.

So I often write stories and essays about my former industrial sites, and feature people —including myself— who may have been impacted by what’s there.

What this means is that not only am I going to tell you, the reader, all the technical details about what happened at the site and what is present in soil and water, I’m going to take you with me when I sample a neighboring well. I’m going to bring you through someone’s living room and into their kitchen so I can collect a sample of what they drink. You will see the to-do lists by the phone, the children’s artwork on the fridge, the prescription bottles by the sink.  You also hear the little boy splashing in the bath while I’m talking to his mother. You, too, will hear his bath-time singsong the entire time we’re there.

Writer Julia Cameron says, “The act of making art exposes a society to itself. Art brings things to light. It illuminates us. It sheds light on our lingering darkness. It casts a beam into the heart of our own darkness and says, ‘See?’”

In science circles, you hear a lot about acceptable risk, whether something is clean enough, and “no evidence of harm.” But we often forget to ask the ethical question of whether it’s right or wrong to conduct nonconsensual experiments on current and future generations in the first place.

THIS is at the heart of my work: shining a light on the things we confine to the corner while we are arguing about the science. I want my work to show you how our society handles matters of science, and ask you to question whether we’re really, truly upholding the values we say that we hold dear.

Image credit: Marketingland.com

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Watching updates of Sandra’s arrest, along with all the other protests on social media and TV reminds me of how demanding this work can be.  Reminds me of the challenge of trudging uphill, of the stamina required to proceed forward despite the forces working against.  Rick Bass wrote a beautiful essay about activism fatigue several years ago: “Activism’s Paradox Mountain“ — a piece to which I find myself returning every now and then.  But there’s a reason they continue to climb, almost always a story behind the sacrifice.

A few weeks ago, I completed an application for a writing retreat, in which I was asked to provide a personal response to the following Virginia Woolf quote:

“I’m fundamentally, I think, an outsider.  I do my best work and feel most braced with my back to the wall. It’s an odd feeling, though, writing against the current: difficult entirely to disregard the current.  Yet of course I shall.”

As a writer whose work is often motivated by environmental issues, this quote speaks to me directly in terms of the margins from which I write — and from which others write, as well.  I know that my ideas and those of my literary heroes aren’t always popular, because they push back against traditionally held American ideals.  Things like capitalism and exceptionalism, the rights and responsibilities of individuals verses corporations, guns and “scientific proof.”  It’s hard to question our traditions — because these ideals have taken many of us far, have rewarded some of us well… well, except for those people and places whose needs are at odds with our traditional American beliefs.

But it seems to me that our greatest truths don’t begin as commonly held beliefs.  Rather, they come from stories — stories of pain, of injustice that we labor to deliver so that the truth may be revealed. That we are all created equal, for instance.  There is still much work to be done on that.

The work is difficult, unsupported.  It would be easier to fold into one’s self and float, bobbing and weaving through the rushing water, propelled by conformity and the sound of its applause, along the path of least resistance.  Easier still to allow your direction and destination to be determined by the urgency and velocity of someone else’s values, of other people’s rules.

And yet.  A salmon will leave the ocean and return to its natal stream, whose salt-free waters will assault its cells and strip the skin right from its flesh.  And fourth generation monarchs will ignore the impulse to mature and mate, saving their energy instead for the long flight from as far north as Canada to Mexico’s southern tail — a journey whose distance and hardship defies all logic, but without which would define the end of its kind.

The work that we do is hard.  We shed our skins and bare our vulnerable selves, and for some of us, this pilgrimage can feel like death.  Or maybe it’s our birth.  Either way, we must continue to write our stories.  The survival of our kind depends on it.

Cover image courtesy of Ecowatch.org

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