Terra

20/20 Vision

Left Brain, Right Brain

OSU biologist Mark Hixon has participated in several of Spring Creek's gatherings. The project "offers a remarkable opportunity for environmental scientists to integrate their intellectual, left-brained worldview with the spiritual, right-brained perspective of environmental writers, poets, and artists," he says. These exercises are "essential for successful conservation and sustainability efforts."

Moore, Goodrich and their colleagues bring diverse academic and literary expertise to the task. Moore has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of law. She has written seven books, including three compilations of essays exploring the cultural values of wet, wild places. That has not always been her focus. Her first book, published in 1989, explores the moral justification for presidential pardons. Since then, she has won a Pacific Northwest Bookseller's Award for Riverwalking (1995) and the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award for Holdfast (1999). In 2005, she won the Oregon Book Award for The Pine Island Paradox.

In addition to several volumes of poetry, Goodrich has written a book of essays (The Practice of Home) and edited two anthologies of poems.

The Spring Creek Project has inspired students such as OSU marine biology graduate Roly Russell. "Places like Shotpouch are necessary," says Russell, now a post-doctoral researcher at Columbia University's Earth Institute. "The overwhelming ecological issues that face our society won't be fixed by a better understanding of the underlying science alone. We need to have places that foster interactions and discussions between people who understand various facets of the issues involved."

In 2004, Russell spent two days at the Shotpouch cabin with a small group of OSU students and faculty. Their topic: science and art as sources of knowledge and ways to communicate in a sustainable society. "This didn't fall into the typical training of scientists like myself. Yet truly cross-disciplinary discussions about what leads people to care and pay attention to their environment are fundamental if we hope to move toward a more sustainable future," he says.

Toward that end, Spring Creek fosters storytelling. Told through poetry, song or scientific report, stories evoke common human values that link people across barriers of culture, politics or religion, say Moore and Goodrich. "On a practical level, it is the most powerful way to bridge different viewpoints, to meet people face-to-face and hear their stories. You can't abstract people into a single position," says Goodrich. "Stories reveal the whole of a life.

"Some scientists are looking to people who specialize in storytelling. And many writers find the stories of science to be very compelling and add a precision that can be missing in lyrical and metaphorical language."

In addition to eliciting stories, Spring Creek programs create an atmosphere that inspires listening, sharing and creative thinking, a kind of leadership training for Spring Creek's mission to "re-imagine the place of humans in the natural world."

"We're just getting started," says Moore. Future Spring Creek programs will focus on ideas related to land ownership, the commons and watershed health.

With the Forest Service, Spring Creek sponsors the Long-Term Ecological Reflections project at the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest. The plan is to bring writers and poets to the forest annually for a week at a time for the next 200 years. The resulting record of creative responses to the forest will help us to understand what forests mean in the human experience.

"Imagine if we had started this project 200 years ago, with Lewis and Clark, what we would know about the changing human response to the land?" Moore says.