A thought for Terry Tempest Williams
As someone born and reared in the west, I have a great affinity for one writer in particular, also an offspring of the western US. She wrote in her recent book, In the open space of democracy:
“we are listening - ears alert - we are watching - eyes open - registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement…our strength lies in our imagnination, and paying attention to what sustains life, rather than what destroys it…Open lands open minds.”
However, Terry Tempest Williams confuses me. She captures the most heartfelt, deep sentiment about what exactly America is, and, more important, that to which it aspires. She makes a connection to social justice, and how corporations are unaccountable for prosperity’s costs to both community and the commons, but I so wish she would write about prescriptions and actions we could take to get to the other side.
I am the child of the WWII generation. My dad was in the Air Force and trained pilots in the use of the top secret airborn radar systems. My mom was accelerated into full medical practice straight out of medical school as civilian America adjusted to deal with the realities of the war. Few women of her generation even made the attempt, but our mom, at least according to family lore, got the hard training as a new doc by treating military families at McLellan Air Force Base near Sacremento. Eventually she became the first female pediatrician in Marin County, on the north end of the GG Bridge. Those years were a remarkable period during which regular challenges emerged to long-held social assumptions about the social roles, the international order, ideologies, and the relative roles of government and business.
In reflecting on that era, as many have come to do in recent years, much is made of the last “world war”, the rise of the American industrial/military capacity, and the march of the middle class into the previous void between the haves and the have-nots. What drove this, though, was innovation, creativity, and, above all, necessity. Solutions mattered more than anything.
I think what Al Gore has been trying to tell us is that there is no great value now in discussing research on climate change, exploring our feelings about it, or matching wits across an ideological or values divide. Rather, it is time for us to act into the crisis and begin doing things. Having a slightly more open-minded resident of the White House may help, but the machinery and processes that get people there still far outweigh any inclination to do right. Business has now decided that “green is the new green” and they are scampering to productize - what a word! - all things environmental. Serious investment in solutions is paltry.
The sad truth, and one to which we all must become accustomed before business can do right, is that it has to come to grips with the fact that we have a very different playing field one that shortly governments, citizens organizations, labor, and consumers must come together to define. Terry, if she’s listening, can help us not simply to understand what is happening, but what to do about it.
Hear an audio clip of Terry Tempest Williams, in an interview about her book Open Space of Democracy:
http://boss.streamos.com/wmedia/wildsidenews/wsnsegments/091604c.wax