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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Understated as it may sound, I’m sad.  We’re all sad, even though we are lucky to have a willing recipient (the Deschutes Public Library) to take some of NOW’s creative writing programs and carry them forward within their own program structure, to align with their own strategic goals.  Even with what I truly believe is an important and beneficial consolidation, I’m still feeling sad.  Because like it or not, NOW’s closing doors say something about this community, about what is happening here.

One thing I know for sure is that within this primordial stew of needs and ideas and blood and sweat and money and tears and everything else that exists within a community of passionate people — within this primordial stew, there are usually a few things around which we can coalesce.  For a while, at least when I first moved here, I thought that one of those organizing principles in Bend was the idea that art is a basic need.  That creative self expression is as necessary to human life as air, as food, as water.   Ask the residents of The Shepherd’s House homeless shelter, for whom The Nature of Words provided creative writing residencies as part of their healing and empowerment process.  I think they might agree.

But recently, I can’t help but wonder whether people do believe that art is a basic need.  I can’t help but notice that this feels more like a stressed ecosystem — where the culture part of our habitat is being leached to such a degree that a student’s first exposure to the personal essay might be on a college application.  Or that the occasional instruction of “Art-in-a-Box” at school has become an acceptable form of art education.  This cannot be the new standard for exploring creativity.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the parent volunteers who teach it, but I have to confess: Art-in-a-Box as a concept makes me die a little inside.

Here’s the thing: art is what connects us as human beings.  The arts are the means by which we inhabit one another’s experiences.  We become more human when we share our stories — and the truth is, as Brian Doyle would say, stories are our food.  Whether they’re written stories, spoken stories, painted, sculpted, and acted stories, or stories that are musically composed.  Culture is part of our habitat.  A basic need.  Necessary for us to thrive.

These needs are provided by a great many local organizations — The Nature of Words was among them, and is again lucky to have a partner who is capable of continuing to meet that need.  But what about the others?  What would happen if they went away?  How would we all get fed?

I think it’s easy for us to become complacent about the importance of the arts — until we’ve suffered a loss that reminds us of that particular nutritional need.  Example: how many Facebook posts of Dr. Maya Angelou did you read upon her recent passing?  And what would our habitat be like if she hadn’t shared her words?

I hope the vacancy left by The Nature of Words will be felt in this community, and that it will motivate all of us to ask ourselves how much we value our arts and culture organizations.  Not just appreciate, but value.  The distinction is important.

Photo credit: World of Paris Blog, http://worldofparis.wordpress.com/tag/art-is-a-basic-need/

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I linger on the edge with my camera around my neck.  I had intended to take pictures of the parade, but instead I lean against the chain-link fence around Troy Field —where the fair is held— noticing the line of dead grass around the entire fenced perimeter.  It appears they must have sprayed.

Later, I will learn that Troy Field is named after Troy Laundry, a former dry-cleaning facility that used to sit adjacent to the field, where the city’s parking lot now resides, next to the learning garden beds.  Later, I will learn that the business burned to the ground after 60 years of operation, and that when the city purchased the land nearly 20 years ago, they discovered perchloroethylene in the soils beneath the site.  I will read about how they had to excavate and remove 41,000 pounds of contaminated soils, and I will resurrect my technical training and wonder if what they did was really enough.  I’ll wonder what happened to the ground water, or if they even bothered to look.

But I won’t know about that until later.  Now I just watch, with a feeling of unease, the bright green grass fluttering against the blanched color of straw.

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Original artwork by Irene Hardwicke Olivieri, image courtesy of The Nature of Words

On Earth Day, I attend a presentation by artist Irene Hardwicke Olivieri about turning emotions into art.  Her work reminds me of Frida Kahlo’s paintings: vibrant and twinged with pain, but gentler in its form.  The characters in Irene’s paintings are deeply rooted and intertwined with all manner of plants and animals — sometimes even painted as animal-human hybrids, and always rising up from the burden of emotional despair.

She flips through the slides, telling us the stories that inspired each painting.  Family secrets, animal cruelty, environmental harm.  The stories are interconnected.  And yet, her work is steadfast in its transcendence above the suffering.  In seeking a natural and spiritual oasis.  I think her message is this:  Save Nature — Nature Saves.  Or maybe the other way around.

I understand this, as someone who retreats to the trails whenever the demons start to show.  And I understand the healing power of natural immersion.  There is nothing quite as grounding as locking eyes with a bird of prey, or mixing tracks with a herd of elk.  There is solace in the company of animals.

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When I was a kid, Earth Day was a day when you paused to remember the plight of the spotted owl, a day when you expressed your hope that the wilderness you’d taken for granted would still be there after you passed on.  Earth Day was like a prayer that the animal pacing the cage at the zoo or slumped in the corner on the other side of the glass wasn’t the only animal left of its kind — a prayer that the artist’s rendering of their habitat wasn’t all that remained.

But that was just my childhood view, uninformed in the permeable membranes between earth and plant and animal and human and animal and plant and earth.  I am reminded of this now, looking at my research about chemicals in water and soil, chemicals in us.  I am thinking about Irene’s painting of a woman in the belly of a cat, lapping water from the edge of a lake.  We are the animals, too.  And every year that passes, it seems that Earth Day becomes more about saving us.

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Procession:  The act of moving along or forward; progression.  This procession should yield progression.  Consider: Wouldn’t it be nice if we celebrated Earth Day with the Progression of the Species from the field of our past mistakes?

Photo Credit:  Original photography by Carol Sternkopf Photography

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