Without further rhetoric or utopian scheming, I have a simple suggesting that if followed would begin to bring wilderness, farmers, people, and their economies back. That is: don't move. Stay still. Once you find a place that feels halfway right, and it seems time, settle down with a vow not to move any more. Then, taking a look at one place on earth, one circle of people, one realm of beings over time, conviviality and maintenance will improve.
School boards and planning commisions will have better people on them, and larger and more widely concerned audiences will be attending. Small enviornmental issues will be attended to. More voters will turn out, because local issues at least make a difference, can be won -- and national scale politics too might improve, with enough folks getting out there.
People being to really notice the plants, birds, stars, when they see themselves as members of a place. Not only do they begin to work the soil, they go out hiking, exploer the back country or the beach, get on the Freddie's ass for mismanaging People's land and doing that as locals counts!
Early settlers, old folks, are valued and respected, we make an effort to learn their stories and pass them on to our children, who will live here too. We look deeply back in time to the original inhabitants, and too far ahead to our own descendants, in the mind of knowing a context, with its own kind of tools, boots, songs.
Mainstream thinkings have overlooked it: real people stay put. And when things are coasting along OK, they can also take off and travel. They'res no delight like swapping stories downstream. Don't Move! I'd say this really works because here on our side of the Sierra, Yuba river country, we can begin to see some fruits of a mere fifteen years inhabitation, it looks good.
[Reprinted from the Heartland Bioregion Communicator, produced by the Three Rivers Project. The Heartland Bioregion, the upper watershed of the Susqahanna river, borders Tompkins County and includes Binghampton, Otsego County, Madison County and Cortland County. Write to Three Rivers Project, PO Box 252, South New Berlin, NY 13843 or call 607-336-4205.]
