Teaching About Place: Learning From The Land

Chapter 13. Gifts and Misgivings in Place

c h a p t e r 1 3 Gifts and Misgivings in Place p a u l l i n d h o l d t Teaching environmental studies to rural Westerners differs from teaching it in cities on the coast. To adopt an easy formulation, made by the press during the 2004 elections, one might typify the rural inland as “red” politically and the coast as “blue.” Mainstream America may romanticize western values by making the rural West seem simple and bucolic, but teaching here is rarely easy. It can require a fundamental shift to reimagine one’s audience. To complicate the educator’s task even further, publications for tourists and backpackers idealize rural western landscapes, representing them as commodities for sale but rarely as places to put down roots and learn to get along well with the neighbors. As someone who teaches classes in literature and environment in rural eastern Washington, I ask my students to grapple with such issues. I ask how “the tragedy of the commons” might reference more than natural resources in the quality of the lives we lead. In an essay by that title, Garrett Hardin wrote about a hypothetical common ground where ranchers graze cattle and ought to share in a wish to sustain the resource. Instead, all ranchers keep adding more cows or cow-calf pairs p a u l l i n d h o l d t 1 8 7 to their share till the pasture grows depleted and collapses. That is the tragedy of the commons: that greed and privilege often exhaust the common good. Jared Diamond, in his book Collapse, explores such patterns of exploitation throughout a number of eras and civilizations. I aim to widen the semantic range of “the tragedy of the commons” to include more-basic elements in the hierarchy of human needs. Safety and space are species of resources, I maintain, less tangible perhaps than browse and grass but substantial all the same. Some Americans, for example—tied to Old West myths of freedom and power—remain bound to weapons and to their right to use them. And words, like weapons, may be granted constitutional rights, despite the potential dangers inherent in such rights. i n e a r s h o t o f w a t e r One spring the Spokane River was running high, arrowleaf balsamroot yellowingtheshouldersoftheroad,snowmeltboomingtwentythousand cubic feet a second toward its confluence with the Columbia River. My wife pointed out the window of the car I was driving and cried out. A cat that looked like Weezie, her timid tom that had gone missing two days before, was mousing on a hill beside the river. I coasted the decrepit Honda wagon to the gravel shoulder and set the brake. I was quite convinced that she had the wrong cat, but I never got a chance to learn for sure. Out of the car she leapt and began to call and coax. We made a family tableau—her crouching, me akimbo between the car and the open door. A magpie lit on a telephone line overhead just then, and I turned away from the cat. Conditioned by my past life as a hunter, I briefly considered dropping that magpie from the wire. Magpies, the most voracious avian predators 1 8 8 m e e t i n g t h e c h a l l e n g e s in the West, rob nests and nestlings. They eat crops and ravage gardens. One hunter claimed the birds like to enlarge wounds in cattle and hop inside to devour them from the inside out. A powerful pellet rifle lay in the car; a friend and I had been sighting it in the day before, and I had forgotten to put it away. No one but Karen would witness my little lapse from the law for a good cause. My musing on the bird overhead came to a quick end, though, when a rock slapped into roadside weeds and the magpie flew. Another rock whizzed overhead, this one colliding with a Yield sign some thirty yards away. The clang echoed off the road. On a stump behind us stood a young David. From one hand dangled a sling, two laces linked by a leather pocket and whirled. What a crude weapon to master and grow so accurate with! I shouted at him; I cursed. He...