Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [57]
What I’m trying to say is that we all can chose to be overwhelmed, or we can choose to take simple steps. When I decided to run for office, it was a remarkably simple step. It just seemed the obvious thing to do. I wanted a choice and I wanted my friends to have a choice.
Since I first wrote this article I have decided to follow my own advice. I am running for Governor of the state of Vermont. I need someone who represents the values of my friends and myself. One never knows where simple steps will lead us, but a least we know we are in motion. It’s really that simple.
Senator Susan Bartlett lives in Vermont with her husband Bill, Lulu the labradoodle, twin cats Howard and Dean, and two Morgan horses. When she’s not involved in the political world, Susan loves to read, travel, cook, and take agility classes with Lulu.
Challenging a Corporation to Clean Up Its Act
THAÏS MAZUR
Protecting the wild core of our sustenance requires vigilance and sometimes dedicated action. When I gave birth to my only child, I chose to leave the crowded city and move to a five-acre homestead on the rugged coastline of Northern California. As a new mother, I envisioned a healthy, pristine environment in which to teach my daughter the joys of living close to the earth. In a totally unexpected twist of fate, my vision quickly shifted.
One day, while driving to town, I stopped at a red light. My year-old daughter babbled to herself in the back seat. As I sat lost in thought, my eyes drifted to the west where I saw the familiar cyclone fence cordoning off the Georgia Pacific Corporation (GP) lumber mill that had recently shut down. The mill site sits three miles north of my home and covers 434 acres, stretching along four miles of coastline and making up one-third of the town of Fort Bragg. It was used as a military base, an Indian reservation, and successive lumber mill sites for close to 150 years. The longstanding timber industry practices had turned a breathtaking headlands teeming with life into a wasteland of barren soil and abandoned buildings.
As I pondered the history of the land, I felt, more than heard, a calling that shook me to my bones. It started as a low moan and grew to a high-pitched wail. My chest felt as though it would burst from tremendous grief. The sharp blast of a car horn snapped me back to my place behind the wheel. The light had turned green and cars were impatiently maneuvering around me.
Weeks later, I learned that the Georgia Pacific property was put up for sale. I knew Georgia Pacific was the largest landholder in the United States and one of the five largest corporations. Their financial success, based on extraction, was a perfect fit for the harvesting of California’s productive timberlands, one of our state’s largest economic resources.
The headlands on which the now-defunct mill sat had been off limits to local citizens for more than a century, making Fort Bragg a coastal town without a coast. Public access was quickly in the minds of local residents when news first broke of the mill’s last closure. GP had finally depleted the timber resource. There was a problem, however. The land was rumored to need a great deal of environmental remediation.
My good friend Loie Rosenkrantz, my husband, and I began ruminating on the good and not so good things that could happen in place of a mill.
At a satellite Bioneers conference held in Caspar, a small town south of Fort Bragg, we listened as John Todd, a pioneer in bioremediation, gave a lecture on his work using plants to clean polluted lakes