Kentucky Rising: Poet Wendell Berry, others protest mountaintop-removal mining at KY guv's office

Daniel Shea, Hell's Gate, from his 2007 Appalachian photo series "Removing Mountains"

Today is day four of a sit-in in the Kentucky governor's office by 76-year-old poet Wendell Berry and 13 other Kentucky Rising activists who are calling for an end to harsh mountaintop-removal mining. The group is urging Gov. Steve Beshear to "lead by ending mountaintop removal, by beginning a sincere public dialogue about creating sustainable jobs for our hard-working miners, by putting the vital interests of ordinary Kentuckians above the special interests of an abusive industry." In his 2011 State of the Commonwealth speech, Beshear decried "Washington bureaucrats" over what he calls the "arbitrary and unreasonable regulations on the mining of coal." "Get off our backs," he said of the EPA.

Writes Berry: "[O]ur protest is against methods of mining that are abusive. We do not oppose mining per se. Our purpose is to protect our land and water. And we most certainly bear no ill will against those who work in mines."

Authors Michael Pollan and Bill McKibben have been vocal in support of the activists. McKibben:

It's about time that people said: 'No more business as usual, if that means leveling the mountains of southern Appalachia.' And it comes as no surprise that Wendell Berry is in the forefront, as he has been for an entire generation. When the rest of the nation sees the person we most associate with Kentucky taking a stand like this, we pay attention."

Last summer, Berry ungifted his papers to the University of Kentucky, his home state, after it decided to name its basketball players' dormitory after the coal industry.

Today is I Love Mountains Day, when activists are marching to the Kentucky capitol in protest of the mining procedure.

Why Wendell matters

"In the 1970s, [poet-essayist Wendell Berry] made new-guard environmentalism look aged by marrying it with traditional agrarian sentiment. Then he made 'conservatives' look like reckless futurists by pointing to the threat that unchecked market growth and technological expansion pose to both community values and ecological well-being. In a nation ostensibly locked into a well-defined political divide, he represents an American voice that avoids easy classification." If you've been reading Eyeteeth for awhile, you'll expect the occasional surfacing of a Berry poem or essay. And as another poem cycled to the top of the self-turning compost pile that is my desk recently, I realized Berry truly is "the" poet for these times. As Mark Engler wrote in the essay quoted above, Berry's independent path--neither modern, postmodern, nor traditionalist, not really left or right, his NYU-meets-Henry County, Kentucky pedigree--presents a third way in these polarized times. No one can make issues of community, responsibility, and environment resonate so deeply. But beyond these content areas, his spiritual work is what ends up being a balm when I'm agitated about the world or my circumstances within it: it's a Christian perspective, I suppose, that doesn't bonk you on the head, a Buddhist perspective that seems perfectly at home here in the US of A.

HOW TO BE A POET
(to remind myself)

I
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill -- more of each
than you have -- inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

II
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensioned life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything
that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

III
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of the silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

--Wendell Berry

Wendell Berry withdraws donation of his papers to university over Big Coal ties

Poet Wendell Berry is ungifting his writings to his alma mater, the University of Kentucky, over its plans to name a basketball players' dormitory after the coal industry. Said Berry, who taught at the university:

“The University’s president and board have solemnized an alliance with the coal industry, in return for a large monetary ‘gift,’ granting to the benefactors, in effect, a co-sponsorship of the University’s basketball team. That — added to the ‘Top 20’ project and the president’s exclusive ‘focus’ on science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — puts an end to my willingness to be associated in any way officially with the University.”

Read Berry's "How to be a poet"

Bits: 02.15.11

Raphaël Zarka, Riding Modern Art, 2007

• The Indianapolis Museum of Art, which has "152 acres of gardens and woodland," outlines its environmental stewardship work, and how it measures its carbon footprint.

• Kentucky Rising activists, including poet Wendell Berry, ended a four-day sit-in protest at the Kentucky governor's office yesterday afternoon, emerging from the building to a crowd of 1,000 people. Highlighting the destructive practice of mountaintop-removal mining, Berry vowed to keep pressure on the governor, who's up for reelection. He said, “We came because the land, its forests, and its streams are being destroyed by the surface mining of coal, because the people are suffering intolerable harms to their homes, their health, and their communities.”

• Read Wendell Berry's poem, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front."

• Michael Bloomberg's family foundation is making $32 million in grants to arts organizations around New York City; 250 small and midsized art groups in operation for at least two years have been invited to apply.

• Chinese artist Ai Weiwei has cancelled his first retrospective in mainland China. AFP reports that the show, scheduled for the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing, was canned after its organizers told Ai the show was "politically sensitive." Ai has long been a critic of China's communist government, and has paid the price: he's been arrested, beaten and jailed, and in November his studio was razed. "The timing is sensitive and politically they feel it is not suitable at the moment," he said.

• Italian collecitve IOCOSE has futzed with Ai Weiwei's Sunflower Seeds, an installation of 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds in Tate Modern's Turbine Hall, to create Sunflower Seeds on Sunflower Seeds: On Jan. 31, they left real sunflower seeds in with Ai's replicas, apparenlty shooting some of the seeds in with slingshots.

• Vintage book cover: Secrets of the Shopping Mall, apparently a horror book, via Brian Ulrich.

• Banksy's Exit Through The Gift Shop is up for an Oscar, prompting questions about how or if the incognito artist will accept his trophy. Amid the hubub: a sighting of a new Banksy piece in LA, and a new mini-documentary on the artist.

• With Crashvertising -- what Bruce Sterling calls "wry and smirking European anticapitalist intervention-art," Italy's Kook-Artgency sends a team "immediately to the spot, showing an advertising campaign on large scale posters and giving away safety vests with a brand’s logo to all the people involved in the road accident. Furthermore, 'a special warning triangle with your brand message is located near the cars,' and 'gadgets or other advertising stuff are given away to people in the area.'"

Wendell Berry: A Citizen's Response to the National Security Strategy of the United States of America

Orion Magazine published this essay by Wendell Berry as a full-page ad in the Sunday New York Times. Read it online, or request a free issue containing the full essay (it's abridged in the ad). An excerpt:

THE NEW NATIONAL SECURITY STRATEGY published by the White House in September 2002, if carried out, would amount to a radical revision of the political character of our nation. Its central and most significant statement is this:

While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists...(p. 6)

A democratic citizen must deal here first of all with the question, Who is this "we"? It is not the "we" of the Declaration of Independence, which referred to a small group of signatories bound by the conviction that "governments [derive] their just powers from the consent of the governed." And it is not the "we" of the Constitution, which refers to "the people [my emphasis] of the United States."

This "we" of the new strategy can refer only to the president. It is a royal "we". A head of state, preparing to act alone in starting a preemptive war, will need to justify his intention by secret information, and will need to plan in secret and execute his plan without forewarning. The idea of a government acting alone in preemptive war is inherently undemocratic, for it does not require or even permit the president to obtain the consent of the governed. As a policy, this new strategy depends on the acquiescence of a public kept fearful and ignorant, subject to manipulation by the executive power, and on the compliance of an intimidated and office dependent legislature. To the extent that a government is secret, it cannot be democratic or its people free. By this new doctrine, the president alone may start a war against any nation at any time, and with no more forewarning than preceded the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Would be participating citizens of a democratic nation, unwilling to have their consent coerced or taken for granted, therefore have no choice but to remove themselves from the illegitimate constraints of this "we" in as immediate and public a way as possible.

THE ALLEGED JUSTIFICATION for this new strategy is the recent emergence in the United States of international terrorism. But why the events of September 11, 2001, horrifying as they were, should have called for a radical new investiture of power in the executive branch is not clear.

The National Security Strategy defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents" (p. 5). This is truly a distinct kind of violence, but to imply by the word "terrorism" that this sort of terror is the work exclusively of "terrorists" is misleading. The "legitimate" warfare of technologically advanced nations likewise is premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents. The distinction between the intention to perpetrate violence against innocents, as in "terrorism," and the willingness to do so, as in "war," is not a source of comfort.

Supposedly, if a nation perpetrates violence officially -- whether to bomb an enemy airfield or a hospital it is not guilty of "terrorism." But there is no need to hesitate over the difference between "terrorism" and any violence or threat of violence that is terrifying. The National Security Strategy wishes to cause "terrorism" to be seen "in the same light as slavery, piracy, or genocide" (p. 6) but not in the same light as war. It accepts and affirms the legitimacy of war.

THE WAR AGAINST TERRORISM is not, strictly speaking, a war against nations, even though it has already involved international war in Afghanistan and presidential threats against other nations. This is a war against "the embittered few" "thousands of trained terrorists" -- who are "at large" (p. 5) among many millions of others who are, in the language of this document, "innocents," and thus are deserving of our protection.

Unless we are willing to kill innocents in order to kill the guilty, the need to be lethal will be impeded constantly by the need to be careful. Because we must suppose a new supply of villains to be always in the making, we can expect the war on terrorism to be more or less endless, endlessly costly and endlessly supportive of a thriving bureaucracy.

Unless, that is, we should become willing to ask why, and to do something about the causes. Why do people become terrorists? Such questions arise from the recognition that problems have causes. There is, however, no acknowledgement in The National Security Strategy that terrorism might have a cause that could possibly be discovered and possibly remedied. "The embittered few," it seems, are merely "evil."

On The Gates: "A work of pure joy, a vast populist spectacle of good will and simple eloquence, the first great public art event of the 21st century." That's how Times art critic Michael Kimmelman described New York's largest public art project ever, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's The Gates. Made up of 7,500 gates hung with flowing saffron fabric, the work turns 23 miles of Central Park pathways into a meditative, colorful passageway. It reminds me of the robes of Thai Buddhist monks, the prayer flags that wave in the breezes of Ladakh or Tibet; while the artists eschew any such interpretation, it seems a work of healing for a city that's experienced such deep wounds.

The project is only up for two weeks more, then it comes down for good, a fact--along with a $20 million pricetag (paid for out of the artist's pockets)--that makes many question it's practicality. But a New York fourth-grader summed it up well: it doesn't have to be practical; it's art. "It's a waste of money, but it's fabulous. It brings happiness when you look at it." It's a touching statement to me, because art seems increasingly anomalous to contemporary culture: it stands alone as something that doesn't exist to serve the economy or perform a measurable task. And that's art's value. As Wendell Berry once wrote, "So, friends, every day do something that won't compute." Aesthetic opinions of The Gates aside, I think we could stand to learn its lesson. Berry's poem captures something true about the lyric absurdity and epic beauty of the project. The poem concludes:

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.

Bits: 12.21.10

Shopping cart Christmas tree in Emeryville, Calif., by Anthony Schmitt. Photo: danielsjf, Flickr, used with permission

• Artist/experimental geographer Trevor Paglen talks surveillance on Studio 360. Via C-Monster.

• Not all Catholics buy into divisive anti-art (and anti-intellectual) rhetoric like that of Bill Donohue of the Catholic League: When national bishops' conference president Archbishop Timothy Dolan came to Donohue's defense on the archdiocese's blog, both commenters and the group Catholics United decided to have their say. (Good luck commenting: Both of All three of mine were rejected.)

• Jerry Saltz pens a letter to congressional Republicans about where they can take their censorship of David Wojnarowicz's work next: through the full span of global art history on display in the Met's collection.

• Grief as absence and presence: Artist AA Bronson's photo of his partner Felix in bed shortly after his death from AIDS -- the work Bronson unsuccessfully tried to pull from the NPG's Hide/Seek show in protest of the Smithsonian's removal of Wojnarowicz's video -- is a haunting book-end to Felix Gonzeles-Torres' 1991 black-and-white billboard showing an empty bed, his tribute to his lover, Ross, who died from AIDS (as did Gonzales-Torres, five years later).

• NPR's "Best Album Covers of 2010" includes one for S. Carey by Minneapolis photographer Cameron Wittig, whose work is now on view at Black Blue in St. Paul. Here's more of his music photography, which includes cover photos for albums by Andrew Bird, Haley Bonar, and others.

• Apropos of nothing: Go (re)read some Wendell Berry.

• Well, that's not exactly getting into the holiday spirit, is it?

Jesus, the Earth, and Ann Coulter

The University of St. Thomas' campus recycling web page features the quoted wisdom of environmental thinkers and spiritual leaders like Jesus, Wendell Berry, Martin Luther King, the Dalai Lama, Senegalese ecologist Baba Dioum and Aldo Leopold. A curious inclusion:

"God gave us the earth. We have dominion over the plants, the animals, the trees. God said, 'Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it. It's yours.'"

-- Ann Coulter, Fox-TV: Hannity & Colmes, 20 Jun 01

Food activists call for a "sustainable Secretary of Agriculture"

Eighty-eight food and farming activists -- including Michael Pollan, Francis Moore Lappé, Bill McKibben, Alice Water and Wendell Berry -- have sent a letter to Barack Obama urging the appointment of a sustainability-minded Secretary of Agriculture. The top six suggestions include Minnesota Secretary of State, who worked at the Institute for Ag and Trade Policy. More here.

Mothers Day Proclamation(s) of Peace

Before Hallmark got to it, Mother's Day wasn't so much about flowers and cards and tender poems. It was about peace. Julia Ward Howe, best known for authoring the "Battle Hymn of the Republic," wrote the following proclamation in response to the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War in 1870. It's a call to arms, of sorts, calling women--and men--to be engaged mothers (and fathers):

Arise then, women of this day!

Arise all women who have hearts, whether your baptism be of water or of tears!

Say firmly:

'We will not have questions decided by irrelevant agencies.

'Our husbands shall not come to us reeking of carnage for caresses and applause.

'Our sons shall not be taken from us to unlearn all that we have been able to teach them of charity, mercy, and patience.

'We women of one country will be too tender to those of another country to allow our sons to be trained to injure theirs.

'From the bosom of a devastated Earth a voice goes up with our own, it says "Disarm! Disarm!"

'The sword of murder is not the balance of justice.

'Blood does not wipe out dishonor, nor violence indicate possession.'

As men have forsaken the plow and the anvil at the summons of war, let women now leave all that may be left of home for a great and earnest day of counsel.

Let them meet first as women, to bewail and commemorate the dead.

Let them solemnly take counsel with each other as to the means whereby the great human family can live in peace, each bearing after his time the sacred impress not of Caesar, but of God.

In the name of womanhood and humanity, I earnestly ask that a general congress of women without limit of nationality be appointed and held at some place deemed most convenient and at the earliest period consistent with its objects, to promote the alliance of the different nationalities, the amicable settlement of international questions, the great and general interests of peace.

Of course there were other Mother's Days, but this one seems most apropos today. I'm reminded, because of the example of my own mom--her example of peace-making, and the kind of Catholic social-justice "engaged spirituality" she and my dad taught me--of an excerpt from one of my favorite Wendell Berry poems, "Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front," which, ending with the powerful command "Practice resurrection," seems to fit the kind of mother's day we need today:for power, please women more than men.
Ask yourself: will this satisy
a woman satisfied to bear a child?
Wil this disturb the sleep
of a women near to giving birth?Seems like a decent measure to me. (After all Saddam and Osama and George W and Dick aren't women.) But women aren't faring so well in this world. Globally women (and children) suffer disproportionately in terms of poverty, violence and disease (Billl Gates speaking on NOW Friday night backs this up, as did Cheryl Thomas, director fo the 0 comments

Bibliomancy

Early this morning I opened up a book to find this poem. Personally and politically, it seems quite important right now:

Did I believe I had a clear mind?
It was like the water of a river
flowing shallow over the ice. And now
that the rising water has broken
the ice, I see what I thought
was the light is part of the dark.

--Wendell Berry, "Breaking"

Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

Wendell Berry has so many important things to say. The essay "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" was written in response to September 11.

"...What leads to peace is not violence but peaceableness, which is not passivity, but an alert, informed, practiced, and active state of being. We should recognize that while we have extravagantly subsidized the means of war, we have almost totally neglected the ways of peaceableness. We have, for example, several national military academies, but not one peace academy. We have ignored the teachings and the examples of Christ, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and other peaceable leaders. And here we have an inescapable duty to notice also that war is profitable, whereas the means of peaceableness, being cheap or free, make no money."

How to Be a Poet

I
Make a place to sit down.
Sit down. Be quiet.
You must depend upon
affection, reading, knowledge,
skill - more of each
than you have - inspiration,
work, growing older, patience,
for patience joins time
to eternity. Any readers
who like your poems,
doubt their judgment.

II
Breathe with unconditional breath
the unconditioned air.
Shun electric wire.
Communicate slowly. Live
a three-dimensional life;
stay away from screens.
Stay away from anything that obscures the place it is in.
There are no unsacred places;
there are only sacred places
and desecrated places.

III
Accept what comes from silence.
Make the best you can of it.
Of the little words that come
out of silence, like prayers
prayed back to the one who prays,
make a poem that does not disturb
the silence from which it came.

—Wendell Berry

News from the commercial front: trends, sell-outs, oddities of consumerism

Will the virtual Slim Shady please stand up? Forget MTV: more and more pop stars are choosing to debut their soon-to-be-hit singles on video games. Like pop-punkers Good Charlotte, whose "Anthem" was featured in the game Madden NFL 2003, Blink-182 will use the game's 2004 edition to premiere their song "Action." Hip hop star Fabolous went a step further; he used video-game maker Electronic Arts' ad motto as the title of the single "It's in the Game," which appears in NBA Live 2003. But for some stars, even that's not enough: celebrities from Jon Bon Jovi, Christina Aguilera and Avril Lavigne to game show host Alex Trebek and rapper Ludacris are negotiating with video game makers, including the maker of The Sims, to include their digitized likenesses in the games. Eminem's Slim Shady should be a game character early next year.

Sending out non-recyclable promotional CDs was once the sole domain of AOL, but now free CDs are, er, popping up everywhere—including in soft drink cup lids. The LidRock company produces CDs for independent record labels then embeds them into the lids of disposable soda cups at movie theaters. In one case, some 4.8 million of pop singer Rachel Farris' CDs will be distributed at Regal Entertainment Groups' 530 theaters in 36 American states. Such enhanced CDs, including music, videos and sometimes interviews, have been used by Acuvue contact lenses, Pepsi campaigns in Spain and Latin America eventually adding more than 2.5 million CDs to landfills. (Nomoreaolcds.com, founded in 2001, aims to deliver a million AOL CDs—a stack three times larger than the Empire State Building—to the company in protest of the free-CD practice. So far, they've collect 193,331 CDs.)

I See You. Since 9/11 we've seen an explosion in anti-terrorism technology, from advances in biometrics and recognition software to the installation of some 30 permanent surveillance cameras in downtown Minneapolis (donated by Target Corporation to police the 22-block region surrounding their corporate HQ). But the mother of all surveillance tools might be the touchy-feeling sounding LifeLog project currently being developed by the US government's DARPA. An "ontology-based (subsystem)," LifeLog tracks every aspect of a person's interactions with the world using "a GPS transmitter to keep tabs on where that person went, audio-visual sensors to capture what he or she sees or says, and biomedical monitors to keep track of the individual's health," according to Wired. While participation in the program is voluntary, civil libertarians are wondering what the applications might be. If the intent is to create behavioral profiles to help weed out potential terrorists, make sure your morning latte run and leisurely park-bench rendezvous with the daily paper don't coincide with Saddam's.

Net worth. With the internet overrun by corporations--a 2001 study by Jupiter Media Matrix determinded that 14 companies control 60% of users online time (down from 110 companies in 1999)--the future of independent online media doesn't look good. FCC media bureau head Ken Ferree announced last week that there's no need to impose rules preventing broadband internet providers from altering or entirely blocking out content created by its competitors. So, if Eyeteeth pisses off AOL Time Warner, there's nothing to stop them from keeping my site off of AOL altogether. Something hopeful: the Ninth Court of Appeals ruled recently that bloggers deserve libel protection, since blogs repost already available material and, thus, consist entirely of commentary (i.e. speech). Take that, AOL.

You're the man. Or not. According to The Guardian, trend-spotter Marian Salzman coined the term "wigger" (a white surburban hip-hop fan) and predicted the resurgence of '70s fashion. Let's hope she's not right about this catchword: the "metrosexual man"--target market (and wuss) extraordinaire. I quote: "marginalised by the women's movement, portrayed as useless in TV sitcoms and told by scientists that his Y-chromosome is in decline [he] is worth millions to marketers. Advertisers, she argues, will soon be capitalising on his low self-esteem and targeting him with products to 're-empower' him. Meanwhile, you can recognise metrosexual man, says Salzman, by the fact that he's increasingly family-focused and struggling to adopt female characteristics in a world in which gender traits are converging. 'The definition of what it means to be male and middle-aged is changing... tits and arse will be replaced with appeals to men's minds; the laddish must give way to the sensitive. I don't think companies realise how much men have changed.'"

For balance: I've posted it before, but here--again--is an excerpt from Wendell Berry's brilliant poem, Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front.

As soon as the generals and the politicos
can predict the motions of your mind,
lose it. Leave it as a sign
to mark the false trail, the way
you didn't go. Be like the fox
who makes more tracks than necessary,
some in the wrong direction.
Practice resurrection.