Climate Crisis 1989: After the Warming

I wrote this piece in 2007 and never published (or posted) it anywhere before, to the best of my recollection.  But it belongs here both as part of this climate crisis awareness history and because it summarizes a television program that deserves to remain part of the dialogue: James Burke's After the Warming, which I quote from in the previous essay.  I'm happy to say that in 2012 it can be seen on YouTube, although not with the quality of the rare and at the moment unavailable DVD version.  I'm not happy to say that 5 years after I wrote this and 23 years after these 1989 warnings, the climate crisis is still not being addressed directly or with the appropriate urgency and scale. 

Nor that Dr. James Hansen, whose 1988 Senate testimony is mentioned, just referred to it in a Washington Post oped in which he says that in terms of its relationship to extreme weather, it's now worse than he thought back then.






We called it Greenhouse Summer. Chicago had seven days over 100 degrees F, and a string of 18 straight over 90. Pittsburgh had more than five times the average number of days above 90, making 1988 the hottest summer in a century. In more than 70 US cities, hot weather exacerbated lingering and dangerous air pollution.

With the heat came drought, especially in the Midwest and South, where it contributed to a 31% decline in the country’s grain harvest. In the West, forest fires lingered into autumn. Titanic fires in Yellowstone resulted from the worst heat, drought and wind conditions there in 300 years.

The phenomenon called the Greenhouse Effect and the predicted catastrophes of CO2-induced global heating were not new in 1988. The first research began in the 1950s, the first tentative conclusions were being drawn in the 1960s, including the possibility of apocalyptic consequences. Arthur C. Clarke mentioned it in a casual conversation with playwright Arthur Miller, as Miller noted. Kurt Vonnegut described the same theory we know today as told to him by a young visitor, in an article published before the first moon landing. By the first Earth Day in 1970, many of us just out of college knew about it.

It was the fact that it was a known theory that made people sit up and take notice in the hot summers of the late 1980s.  In the summer of 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified before the Senate that global warming was happening and was going to get worse unless countermeasures are taken.

Then in 1989 and 1990, the first spasm of articles and books came out (Bill McKibben’s The End of Nature; Dead Heat: The Race Against the Greenhouse Effect by Michael Oppenheimer and Robert H. Boyle.) I believe it was around then that one of the TV networks did a miniseries about it, similar to The Day After, though I don't know what it was called and haven't so far been able to find reference to it.

 But it was definitely in 1989 that James Burke made a two-part television program called After the Warming. (Officially it's dated 1990.) James Burke was known in the US for at least two fascinating and provocative television series seen on PBS, both relating the history of technological development to other aspects of history, such as politics, warfare, social change, even fashion. They were Connections and The Day the Universe Changed.

Burke was so good on television because he explained things simply, yet the connections he made were dazzling in their complexity. He was a lively, even aggressive presence, but engaging. You had to watch him. He came at the end of a short golden age for these series, beginning perhaps with Jacob Bronowski’s Ascent of Man. The most elaborate, most famous of them—and just about the last one—was Carl Sagan’s Cosmos. I don’t know when it was actually broadcast. I happened to see the second part, but it was only a few years ago, when I found the two-VHS tape set in the library, that I saw the whole thing.  It is revelatory in so many ways, and I’m now about to describe it in detail.

The premise of After the Warming is that Burke is speaking from the year 2050, when the world has changed enormously because of climate change. He is looking back on the past fifty years or so, describing how human civilization dealt with the challenge.

But the first 50 minutes goes back much further than that, to describe the influence of climate on human history---beginning with pre-history. Humans became human, Burke says, during the Ice Age, and perhaps because of it. Because game became scarcer, hunting was more complicated, and required cooperation and communication. Humans responded by inventing language. Because plants were scarcer, humans explored for food, and with sea water frozen and sea levels down in such areas as the Bering Straits, they were able to migrate farther.

  Then the planet warmed, the seas rose, and the populations of the Americas and Australia were separated from Europe and Asia. The warmer temperatures and abundance of water led to better growing, more population, the beginning of agriculture and cities. There was so much grain in Iraq in 7000 BC that a system of accounting was needed, so writing was invented.

In 3000 BC drought struck the prosperous area of Egypt. The Nile was the only reliable water source when it flooded, which led to developing systems of irrigation and a host of related innovation: “maps to design the irrigation network, surveying and engineering to lay it out, mud and straw bricks to build it, geometry to measure reservoir volume, metallurgy to make the tools, a calendar to get the river flood date right, management to run it all, tax collectors to cream off the profits, and a state bureaucracy to spend them.” That is, the basics of modern civilization, according to Burke.

Climate changes didn’t have to be global or even very large to have major effects. A change in rain patterns doomed the great civilization of Mycenae, where because of shifting cold air patterns, it didn’t rain for a hundred years. By 300 BC it was warm and moist again in Europe. The Alpine passes in northern Italy became open year round, allowing Rome to conquer the Mediterranean world. China seized the same sort of opportunity in its part of the world. Good weather opened up the “Silk Road” and sea routes, so these two superpowers began trading.

But in 500 AD, the global temperature went down. The Huns of central Asia suffered freezing drought, and invaded the south, displacing other “barbarians” who eventually overran the Roman Empire and ushered in the Dark Ages. A half century later, the temperature went up. Vikings colonized Greenland, where there was grass for sheep. Then it turned cold again in 1300. Greenland had no trees, and soon sea ice isolated it. By 1408, the last colony died out.

 The Little Ice Age gripped Europe in the 16th century, but in England, new technologies were developed to cope with it. Burke demonstrated the innovations of the new manor house: “Stone walls and gravel surround to keep out wet and mud, no more open colonnades and courtyards, steep roofs and guttering to handle a lot of rain, but in spite of the cold they put in big glass windows. New technology… changed their lives.” Like chimneys and fireplaces to heat up small rooms separately. Everyone no longer living around one central fire in a big common room. Those smaller rooms had tapestry, paneling, plasterwork and curtained beds to keep the warmth in and cold out. So now there was privacy. And with those private beds, romance. The chimney allowed for heated offices, so accounts could be kept all year, instead of stopping when the ink froze: more business. The cold meant more life lived indoors, and led to indoor entertainment, like making music.

Then came three decades of warming. With hot, moist summers and warm winters, crop yields in England were at historic highs. Food was cheaper, work was plentiful, and in these prosperous times, people had more children. More households created the need for more household goods. Here’s where Burke shines, with one of those very specific chains of circumstance and (perhaps) causality: the demand for more household goods included iron cooking pots. But to heat the iron to make the pots required wood, which was in dwindling supply. There was lots of coal, but impurities in it spoiled the iron—until someone figured out how to burn out the impurities, to make coke that would be used to make iron. It was at this point that James Watt figured out how to make a steam engine, but he needed high quality iron to make it work. Now he had it. The industrial revolution began—all because of improvement in the weather.

It is at this point that FutureBurke pauses to note the irony in iron: the growing populations and now the steam engine began the era of mass production, and expanding economies and populations. Europe needed more natural resources to keep the machines going, and so the era of colonization began. From coal-fed railroads to oil-fed cars and the next round of petroleum-based innovations—in an age of moderate climate—the cause of the next great climate change was literally being manufactured.

The second fifty minutes of After the Warming begins in our recent past, moves into what was the future in 1989 (when the show was made) but is now also in our past, and then into what is still the future.

Burke reviews the discovery of the CO2 based global warming phenomenon beginning in the late 1950s with the same experiments and measurements in Hawaii that Al Gore describes in An Inconvenient Truth. He described the early manifestations of heating, and the endless studies. He projects inaction into the future, into the 1990s.

But in his scenario, a series of devastating droughts resulting in hundreds of thousands starving in Third World countries, plus food shortages in the US, and a series of wars in the Middle East over oil, pushed the United States into finally supporting action on global warming…in the year 2000.

Think about this for a moment. There have been devastating droughts in Africa and Asia, and hundreds of thousands have died in wars and genocides (as in Darfur) that are likely related to them. There’s been drought in the American West for several years, though globalization has kept food supplies up in the US. And we’ve certainly had wars in the Middle East, though no one announces that they are about oil. Burke’s description may turn out to be how the historians describe our recent past. But we don’t allow ourselves to see it that way.

Burke next posits something startling, based on something that hasn’t happened—but might yet. In his year 2000, Pacific nations had become major powers, to the extent that they led the fight to address global heating. Burke named Japan, which probably seemed more reasonable in the 1980s than now. But how many decades are we from a China and perhaps an India so economically powerful that world leadership does fall to them?

In any case, Burke posits something that by the realities of our 21st century, we might well find incredible: a Planetary Management Authority to organize and enforce efforts to address global heating. The efforts themselves are familiar to us now, however strange they might have seen in 1989, like carbon trading. But there’s a twist in Burke’s history of the future that is just beginning to be talked about: how to get less developed nations into the process. Burke’s PMA manages a system in which advanced nations trade expertise for carbon use rights, as they cut their emissions. That expertise is applied to helping less developed nations become prosperous with clean technologies, as well as to create better health care and education.

The methods used to cut emissions are startlingly familiar: everything from the end of incandescent light bulbs to tax credits for energy efficiency and computer controlled homes to manage that efficiency, plus various clean energy technologies including solar and wind. Burke throws in some realistic details, some of them already on the mark: beginning in 2008, there are several years of devastating tropical storms that kill hundreds of thousands in Australia, Bangladesh and Florida. By 2010 there are refugees and military confrontations at borders over food and water shortages.

But the PMA has some military authority, and must stop a wave of Indonesians trying to get into Australia. By 2010 the global temperature has gone up by 3 degrees F, and water levels have risen by over a foot. Two million have died by starvation. A temperature rise of 5F is forecast for 2020. In that decade, there is greater concentration on local energy systems. Societies are reorganizing into smaller communities instead of big cities. Forestry is a major career. Water is a greater problem. Major rivers in the US and Russia have gone dry. Sea walls are going up to protect coastal cities.

Though there is grain growing in the far north, and being transported through newly opened Arctic waters, there is severe drought in the US. And despite the ongoing transformation, the effects of past greenhouse gas emissions continue to multiply and create feedback loops. Ocean plankton, which now absorbs CO2, begins dying because of the hotter water temperatures, and that CO2 is no longer being absorbed.

Without plankton, the only hope for absorbing CO2 becomes the forests. When several South American nations fail to halt deforestation, the PMA organizes a sea and land blockade to force enforcement. Because of the land required for cattle that had resulted in decades of deforestation, beef is so highly taxed that it disappears from most tables.

Still…by 2020 the temperature has risen 5.4 degrees. The sea has risen 2 feet. Between 2025-2040 it has risen 3 feet, breaking into sewage treatment plants and toxic waste dumps, and spreading disease. In 2050, the PMA assesses its half century of crisis management. There have been 20 million deaths by starvation, but only one nuclear exchange (in the Middle East.)  Kansas and the Riviera are arid, there are palm trees in Massachusetts. But the civilized world is very different than it was in 2000, and carbon neutrality has been achieved.

But then data from the deep ocean comes in, indicating that melting ice and rain in the far north has added so much fresh water to the oceans that the great ocean conveyor—the deep currents snaking in a particular pattern that sets our climate—is slowing down. The result of warmer water is less carbon being absorbed, so the globe is heating twice as fast.

The PMA concludes that carbon emissions will have to be reduced to almost pre-industrial levels of the year 1800. FutureBurke, who has been upbeat throughout, and lives in a prosperous looking if conspicuously energy efficient dwelling with lots of computerized technology, now mentions that the prospects beyond 2050 could have been a lot better if humanity had used that 20 years---between 1980, when global warming became apparent, and 2000, when the PMA was established—to start action instead of arguing.

He ends with a joke from our era. The one about the man who falls from the top of a skyscraper. As he passes the 17th floor somebody asks him how he’s doing. “So far, so good,” he replies.

So here we are. There seems little use in reciting again what has already happened and is happening now: the hundreds of millions of people displaced by drought and natural disasters, the melting of the Arctic and Antarctic, the slowing down of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle, the dying and migrations of animal and plant species everywhere, the increase of pest-borne diseases with increased heat. The droughts, the storms, the heat waves—they’ve all become background noise.

 We’ve had many hotter summers after Greenhouse summer. Flying coast to coast in the US is becoming increasingly difficult because of weather-related delays and cancellations, but it’s just one more of those things, like the idiocy of removing our shoes for Homeland Security. Clearly there is increasing concern, and even increasing political pressure. Al Gore says that no matter who is elected President in 2008, dealing with the Climate Crisis will be high on his or her agenda. But we’ve let more than those 20 years go by.                           

Getting Warmer 2004

As climate disasters around the world increase in number and awful strangeness in 2012, I keep thinking about the early scenes of the 2004 climate crisis disaster movie, The Day After Tomorrow.  They showed a series of apparently unrelated and decidedly freakish and violent weather events, culminating in a tornado epidemic that smashes through Los Angeles.  By now very similar events have in fact happened in various places.  So far in the U.S. the super-tornadoes that have ripped through and leveled huge areas, including in places that have seen few tornadoes before, have not hit major cities, let alone major media capitals.  But the damage done to Los Angeles in this film may be only a slight exaggeration of what would have happened if, for example, one of these tornado outbreaks had moved on to Washington, D.C., which it easily could have.

This piece appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle Insight section on May 30, 2004.  The intense political polarization on the climate crisis "issue" was well underway, and would only get worse.  But there was some hope that this movie and new documentary films would break the resistance, at least in terms of awareness.  By this summer of 2012--the hottest summer in the hottest year so far recorded, with between a fifth and a third of the U.S. in severe and protracted drought--polls are showing more acceptance of the reality of the climate crisis, and its causes.  But political paralysis remains the rule.
      

It's one scary movie. "Climate change is a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism," says the science adviser to the British government. "Temperatures are getting hotter, and they are getting hotter faster than any time in the past," says the international weather expert. "Climate change is poised to change our pattern of life," says the African ecologist. But the U.S. president won't listen.

  The number of extreme weather events doubles from a decade before: lethal heat waves in Europe, floods in Africa, droughts in Asia and the United States. A record 300 million people flee their homes from natural disasters. Carbon dioxide in the atmosphere hits record level. Warming increases the range and virulence of diseases. Trees die in New England. Glaciers melt faster in Alaska. There's a major influx of freshwater in the North Atlantic and a slowdown of ocean circulation below the Arctic Circle. Antarctic ice flows faster into the ocean.

What could be next? Rising sea levels swamp coastal cities. Famine in Europe. Nuclear wars for water. A million species threatened with extinction. The end of life on Earth as we know it.

Sounds exciting, but these aren't scenes from The Day After Tomorrow, the global warming disaster film that opened this weekend. They're from the real world. Everything in the first two paragraphs has happened or is the statement of a real person (including Sir David King, chief science adviser to the British government). Everything in the third paragraph is science-based speculation.

  The movie itself takes huge liberties with known science, in the speed with which global warming brings on a new ice age. The paradoxical possibility of heat leading to ice is real: if cold water from melting glaciers change ocean currents like the Gulf Stream, Manhattan could get colder pretty quickly -- though in a decade, not a New York minute, as The Day After Tomorrow would have it.
But all by itself, heat is already causing problems like drought, crop failures, disease, violent storms -- and is threatening much more as the century proceeds.

Director Roland Emmerich has substituted climate change for the alien threat of his blockbuster Independence Day and the radiation monster of his remake of Godzilla. At first, scientists and environmentalists worried that the film's festival of instant catastrophe might make global warming seem as credible a threat as Van Helsing's vampires, Harry Potter's dementors or this summer's other movie villains. But that's changed, as the Worldwatch Institute and National Resources Defense Council are touting it on their Web sites, and Al Gore spoke at a premiere sponsored by Move-On.org.

Maybe they were all inspired by the Bush administration's attempted muzzling of NASA scientists (who earlier were talking openly about the Ice Age scenario) from responding to questions about the movie. Or maybe it's just that global warming couldn't be taken less seriously in the United States than it is already. While 72 percent of Americans said they were concerned about it in 2000, only 58 percent say so now, and only 15 percent believe it has anything to do with fossil fuel consumption.

Why are we so determined to be oblivious? Perhaps, after the Cold War's thermonuclear threat, and while trying to cope with international terrorism, we're suffering from apocalypse fatigue. Besides, it's hard to get upset about something that sounds so moderate and nice as "global warming." Even the "greenhouse effect" sounds decidedly unthreatening. Who's afraid of a greenhouse? Books continue to be published that contribute solid information, but none has had the simple eloquence or impact of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which got DDT banned and jump-started a new kind of environmental awareness.

Hence the hopes for this heavily advertised movie. But the highest hurdle to overcome may be the time-lapse nature of the problem. What is newest and most challenging about global warming is that once its effects are clearly apparent, it's too late to stop them. Climate and its effects interact with everything, especially the resources we depend on that are getting scarcer, like fresh water, and oil.

  Almost inevitably, many of the changes will be in how we approach life, as individuals and societies. If we get ahead of the curve, these changes will include global cooperation, common commitment, a surge of creativity, community, shared sacrifice and adjustments in values. If we let the crisis overwhelm us, the changes will be just as great but a lot harsher and more destructive.

We'll need a series of attitude adjustments about the future. We need to anticipate problems, not just react to them. We need to have the courage and confidence to act on those anticipations. And we must accept responsibility for the future. We need to think more comprehensively, as Buckminster Fuller used to say, and imagine alternative futures.

The climate crisis is the keystone issue of our time. Addressing it means addressing virtually every other significant environmental and energy problem. Maybe The Day After Tomorrow will nudge bigger audiences for greater educational efforts, and for political change. Perhaps it will revive what remains for me the most cogent media treatment of the subject, the 1990 international television production After the Warming. Host James Burke presented a plausible history of global warming from the perspective of a citizen in 2050. His future self compares us today -- in the do-nothing days before the day after tomorrow -- to the man who falls from the top of a tall building. As he passes the 17th floor, someone asks him how he's doing. "So far, so good," he replies.

The Climate Crisis (2002)

The Climate Crisis

I recently realized that this piece is no longer on the Internet.  It was originally published on June 27, 2002, nearly ten years ago on Inlet.org, a site that no longer exists.  The title was simply "The Climate Crisis," and therein lies a tale already.  Though that expression--the Climate Crisis--was not original with me, it was not yet in common use.  It would be several years before Al Gore started using it, which is what gave it currency.  In fact, this piece advocates using it, as a more accurate name for the phenomenon that until then was usually called 'global warming,' and also to emphasize the urgency with which it must be addressed.

I offer several ideas in this piece.  Some have been tried, others have not.  Celebrities have gotten involved, though with uneven results, and mostly not with the specificity I suggested.  The "one big voice" of an environmental coalition hasn't really happened, although there are dedicated organizations and some coordination, especially to oppose specific legislation or executive action on the federal level.  The goal of elevating this to a moral issue has been only partially successful, and in building "emotional consensus" and a sense of urgency, we've gone two steps forward and three steps back, it seems. 

But the heart of this piece is about nomenclature, and even though the terms I suggested--Climate Crisis and 'global heating' have been a more widespread part of the dialogue, giving elements of this crisis the names that would be immediately meaningful and emotionally powerful to a broad public is still a big problem.  Witness the wimpy "climate change" as the reflexive new label, and especially the talk of "adaptation" and "mitigation," terms for the equally crucial but quite separate problems of dealing with the causes and the effects of global heating, which are confusing and meaningless to everyone not familiar with these bureaucratic terms taken from land use planning.  Some ridiculed the idea that calling it "global warming" was an important factor in the missing urgency , but I still believe it was and is.  Words matter.  They matter a lot.  The resistance and denial of those who really fear the Climate Crisis future may be more powerful.  But especially ten years later, there's nothing to be gained by soft-pedalling the stakes.      

In any case, since this isn't available elsewhere, I am reprinting it as it first appeared.  
© 2002 William Severini Kowinski

Somebody at the end of a Washington environmental organization's press conference recently asked the question: how do we create an "emotional consensus" in support of efforts to address global warming? Nobody had an adequate answer, but the question was exactly the right one.

Another recent C-Span moment recorded journalist Bill McKibben's comment that climate change "is the first morally compulsory, urgent issue since the Civil Rights movement."

Urgent, and a moral issue-- exactly right as well. Right now there is no emotional consensus, no sense of a moral issue. Yet climate change is emerging as the defining context of this century. Scenarios extrapolated from the most modest temperature rise predicted by major scientific organizations foresee large scale human suffering, disease and death, economic disruption and ecological disaster. Scenarios based on the higher end imply mass extinctions, the end of civilization and planetary life as we know it on this earth. It is hard to imagine a greater crisis, yet climate change is not an urgent issue in the U.S. Part of the reason is that this case simply hasn't been made in emotional and moral terms.

A lot of attention has been paid to getting the science right, and to refuting criticism of that science. News has mostly focused on details of treaties and legislation, and scattered reports of effects reputed to be caused by global warming (and then rightly or wrongly refuted.) In other words, from the public point of view, it's been boring and confusing.

Still, at least some information has made its way into the American mind. But there is no sense of urgency. Americans were more worried about Alar on their apples than they are about climate change. There is no real consensus on the stakes. That must change.

Political leaders can't get traction on this issue without public alarm. There are private interests with huge amounts of money and lots of influence opposing efforts to address climate change. As usual, all that can offset them enough to provide leverage for policymakers is public interest, and in this case, a public sense of urgency.

What is needed now goes beyond negotiating mitigation that tries to satisfy both technical and political requirements and winds up doing not enough of either. It goes beyond policy wonking and bureaucratic infighting. It even goes beyond attachment to pet issues, or pushing the usual emotional buttons to work people up to contribute to a campaign fund or flood a congressional office with emails. It requires imagination and concentration. It requires real information told in dramatic and comprehensible ways. It requires commitment to doing it until it is done.

The stakes are very high, for this is an issue like no other. That Civil Rights laws weren't passed when proposed in 1948 was tragic, but not fatal to the cause. The Civil Rights Act passed in 1964, and America has benefited ever since. It was too late for some, but not for all. But if halting the acceleration of climate change is postponed, future efforts may simply be too late for everyone. Terrible and perhaps fatal effects will accelerate inexorably, no matter what treaties are then signed. Americans are used to being able to fix things at the last moment. What will happen when they can't?

In truth, no one can invent a moral issue or create an emotional consensus. But we can provide the spark and start the process by doing the best possible job of framing the issues with clarity and urgency, using the full range of tools available. To start thinking about such an effort, this is what I propose:

1. One big voice -- Existing environmental organizations must form a coalition organization or choose one of their number to run this campaign, but it must be a single voice and a single place the public knows to go to for information, linking with the appropriate other sources. A costly campaign will require a concentration of resources, so money should be channeled to one source. Publicity efforts should be part of a coordinated campaign with the same logo, slogans, and identifiable faces and/or voices in ads.

2. Don't say 'global warming'-- Turn up the heat on terminology. In fact entirely new terms are needed. I believe one of the reasons that global warming and climate change aren't considered urgent is that the words 'global warming' and 'climate change' have no urgency. Though 'warming' might describe a dangerous incremental rise in temperatures, the word itself has mostly good connotations. It's warm & cuddly. Happiness is a warm puppy. Listen to the warm. Can I warm up that coffee? Let's give a warm welcome to...

It takes a counterintuitive leap to think of "warming" as a bad thing. Even as a negative, it is at best, lukewarm. Nothing merely "warm" is urgent, especially in a negative sense. You may urgently desire a warm coat on a cold day, but people don't feel too warm. They feel too hot. Then it's urgent.

Global warming was a dubious improvement over the term it replaced, 'the greenhouse effect.' A useful metaphor to describe what happens when there's too much CO2 in the upper atmosphere, it is otherwise pretty abstract and definitely not scary. To most people, greenhouses are good. Flowers grow in them. They're pretty. The greenhouse effect sounds like it might make the whole world prettier.

There's been a recent move to the term "climate change," but it's too neutral: change can be good, and if the weather is too hot or too cold where you live, you might welcome a change. A better choice is "climate crisis." Ross Gelbspan uses it in the subtitle of his book, The Heat Is On: The Climate Crisis, the Cover-up, the Prescription. Crisis projects urgency. He also uses "heat" rather than "warming." Until even better terms are found, everyone involved should talk about "global heating" and "the climate crisis."
And if you don't think words have anything to do with it, think about the difference between anti-abortion and pro-life, or between pro-abortion and pro-choice. Few remember the language of a single subsection of the Civil Rights Act. They remember "I have a dream today."

3. Bring out the big guns and give them something imaginative to do. Use Hollywood faces and voices, send them places where something can be shown that indicates the effects of global heating. Send Julia Roberts to interview an Inuit elder on camera about the change in Arctic ice and weather patterns, and the effects on the animals and plants. Take an action hero to high altitudes, take Mariel Hemingway up to Mt. Kilimanjaro and measure the snow, and some swimsuit models to an island that will disappear under the water because of global heating.

4. Make this a moral issue. Get the Dalai Lama on camera-he is well aware of these issues. Get Nelson Mandella and Vaclev Havel-get the most articulate and morally respected people in the world. Get religious leaders of all faiths, and send this to where the Civil Rights movement got so much energy and force-the churches. Get Captain Kirk and Captain Picard. There won't be a future unless this is addressed.

5. Be relentless and build momentum. Get some billionaires to pay for relentless TV ads. There must be a few with consciences and consciousness. Do TV and radio programs and web sites, and urge existing TV shows to do something on it. Start by reframing the issue with urgency. Add details (what will happen, where and when.) Get new people on board and in front of the camera.

6. Start now. This campaign should be planned now, and the funds solicited to start it. The year after the 2002 congressional elections will be critical to getting the issue on every candidate's agenda in 2004.

Only if this becomes a priority issue, a moral issue, and an emotional consensus starts to develop, can any presidential candidate offer anything prominent and bold. Such a focus can work partly because the groundwork has been prepared. There's been grassroots activity and education that has increased awareness. There is now enough science to make the claims of a crisis more than credible, and there are many ideas for solutions, so it all doesn't sound hopeless.

What is needed now is the "emotional consensus", the sense of a moral necessity, a cause. I believe it is the responsibility of the environmental community and its organizations to lead first of all by
example, by giving this issue their priority and focus, not in the ordinary way, but by going all out to involve the public in a moral crusade to save the world.

I am an author and otherwise an underemployed writer with no power or influence and few connections. All I can do is offer these ideas in whatever way I can to people who can make things happen.

The Malling of America (Christmas at Greengate Mall)

Greengate Mall.  All photos c by William Kowinski

Christmas at Greengate Mall

Greengate Mall opened in 1965 just outside my hometown of Greensburg, Pennsylvania.  In many ways it was the inspiration for the research that resulted in my book, The Malling of America.  Greengate figures in several chapters, including one in which I describe the all-night process of building the Christmas decorations. 

For over 30 years, Greengate Mall was a major center for Christmas activities for the county community. Even after other malls and shopping centers sprang up, Greengate continued to have the most elaborate Christmas decorations, including the center court train ride for children. When it was the only mall, and then the dominant one especially for the western side of the county, it was a bustling hive of shopping during this season, and the prime place for people to meet up with each other. More than a replacement for Greensburg's Main Street of old, it was the county's Main Street every Christmas.

By 1999, when I last visited it, Greengate was a ghost mall: a gleaming and almost empty shell, invaded by shabbiness and deterioration.  It soon closed altogether. But on that last visit, I could still marvel at its old essence.  Greengate was designed by Victor Gruen, a renowned architect who essentially invented the enclosed shopping mall with his design of Southdale in Minnesota, which opened only nine years before Greengate.  Greengate was also one of the few collaborations between Gruen and the Rouse Company, an important developer (begun by another visionary of the era, James Rouse) that helped define suburbs and cities across America in the second half of the twentieth century.

In many ways, Greengate was a kind of template for enclosed shopping malls that became part of ordinary life throughout the country.  Yet there was still something unique about it, which I tried to describe and define in my book.  Through its layout and architectural touches, it was especially theatrical, though in a subtle way.  I visited way too many malls in my researches, but Greengate remained special in my estimation.

So it could be argued that Greengate had architectural as well as historical significance.  It certainly had local significance for several generations.  But while Greensburg citizens rallied to save its handsome but dilapidated train station as an historic site, to my knowledge no one even considered Greengate worth preserving as a building that could be saved for other uses.  In any case, in the summer of 2003, it was erased from the physical landscape altogether.  What was once the colossus that replaced Main Street became a barren plain of cracked concrete, mounds of debris, and a huge hole bordered by the remnants of a deep foundation.

Shortly thereafter a brand new WalMart rose in its ashes.  When I drove around this new Big Box and its attached shopping center (nostalgically named after Greengate), the entire area was completely unrecognizable.  The roads, the very landscape had been changed.  It wasn't even possible to see exactly where Greengate Mall used to be.    

In 1985-its 20 year anniversary--Greengate installed this
time capsule.  In it, among other things, was a copy of
The Malling of America I signed.  The capsule and its
contents were "lost" during demolition.  Ironically, it
was supposed to be opened in 2005, the year that Walmart
opened there instead.

But if its historic significance had escaped the attention of preservationists, Greengate was and is still alive in the collective memory of Westmoreland County.  It has its own web site (Greengate Mall Revisited) and Facebook page, and has become part of online mall nostalgia, as represented by sites like livemalls, labelscar, and inevitably, deadmalls.

What people remember in particular is Christmas at Greengate. So along with excerpts from the chapter of The Malling of America that describes the night of Christmas decorating, I am adding photos I took of that Greengate Christmas (which I believe was in 1981), along with a selection of comments left at Greengate Revisited concerning Greengate Christmas memories.

Greengate was the first enclosed mall in the Greensburg area--in fact, the first in Westmoreland County.  But it remained such a community center, especially at Christmastime, partly because it was a mall for everyone (or nearly everyone), before non-urban retail began to split so decisively between high and low end. There were some differences, between what I called "bread & butter" malls and "high fashion" malls.  Greengate was more bread & butter, and it was managed as a hometown mall.

Greengate began in the wonder era for malls, when their magic was a combination of newness, easy and free parking and the fantastic comfort-controlled world inside them. With a fountain!That world was a combination of a variety of shops and eating places with a spacious and pleasant environment. It looked like an internal town square, a garden of Eden in a box, Main Street in a spaceship. It was always clean and shining (even in my last visit there in 1999, when it was almost empty of stores, the tile floors gleamed and the fountain gushed as high as ever.) It was the people's palace in the fabled land where every working man is king.

At Greengate that meant certain architectural touches, and lots of space: two levels of wide side courts and a big center court that soared to the ceiling. So the potential community, drawing from nearly all strata of the local population, had room to meet and lots to look at outside the stores. Greengate's management was in tune with its community: a family-oriented, house-proud working class culture with middle class incomes. This all got expressed in the Christmas season with elaborate decorations that built on traditional images for Christmas.

As the mall replaced Main Street, it certainly raised troublesome issues about the loss of public versus and the ascension of corporately controlled "public" space. But in retrospect, Greengate gave a different kind of life to some elements of community. Those Christmas displays enacted fantasy images more elaborately than any on Main Street, though they didn't replace the nostalgia many had for shopping along snowy streets, of the contrast of cold and darkness to the bright lights and warmth of department stores, or unbundling in a booth near the steamy windows of a coffee shop for hot chocolate. Still, for several generations Greengate provided its own set of experiences, and became the locus of nostalgia for seasons like this one.

In these photos you can see the evidence of large crowds.  To some extent, this went on for much of the Christmas shopping season.  I remember one visit when I ran into several people from various times in my local life, beginning with friends of my grandparents and including high school classmates I hadn't seen in years--one after the other, and then in bunches.  It was as surreal as a dream at times.

In the following excerpt, I write about the manager of Greengate Mall, Harry Overly.  He was already a legend in the mall business, and an extremely good guide to what made malls different and successful.  He was also a local legend. Health problems led to his semi-retirement by the late 1980s, but as the following text indicates, he didn't do Christmas up big only at Greengate Mall.  His elaborate decorations at his home were a traditional stop for Greensburgers, who drove by and dropped some money for charity in the pot held by a Christmas elf.  Over the years these locally famous Christmas displays accrued more than a million dollars in donations for several children's health programs, and eventually attracted national notice. In 1994 Overly created a charitable foundation to dispense the proceeds of the displays, and moved them to the Westmoreland County Fairgrounds, where they are still seen every Christmas season. Overly died in 1998 at the age of sixty-eight.  So in addition to some Greengate memories, this is for Harry.

This excerpt from The Malling of America (chapter 8) includes a few additional details from notes I took at the time about the 1981 season, as reflected in my 2002 paperback edition.

Decorating Greengate  (from The Malling of America)

Greengate was known throughout western Pennsylvania for its elaborate Christmas displays, which saturated the entire mall to create a total Christmas fantasy. Greengate had spent some $50,000 on decorations over the years, resulting in a grab bag of holiday images. The train that children rode in center court, for example, was called the Sugar Plum Express, and there the kids could (according to the sign at its entrance) "learn the true meaning of Christmas from the Wizard of Oz." But this year all the decorations were going to be new, and all tied into one Christmas theme: the story of the Nutcracker.

"This is the first time we've done a completely coordinated theme," said Karen Kozemchak. In her mid-twenties, she was Greengate's director of marketing, advertising and promotion. "We wanted something special this year because we're just finishing a major remodeling of the mall. We have a new floor, new fixtures, everything's been repainted, there are lots of new lights. We want to bring people in to see what we've done. Also we want to create a classier image. Our demographics show there's a more upscale market for us out there now. But we don't want to lose our old market either-the decorations came in with lots of purples and pinks, but we're mixing in red and green. This is a very red-and-green area."

"Don't tell him we spent seventy-seven thousand dollars on them," said Harry Overly, Greengate's sardonic manager.

The Christmas season has become a holiday celebrated, more than anywhere else in America, in the shopping mall. Downtown department stores by and large don't do it up as big as the malls now do, and this is where people come, not only to shop but to experience the season.

Christmas shopping is crucial to the mall's economic success. At least a quarter of annual retail sales and half of the retailers' profits are chalked up in these few weeks. More than a third of what consumers spend during the year is spent for Christmas. The mall environment is expensive to maintain-without a good Christmas, most malls could be in trouble. So they deck the halls of Maplewood Mall in Minnesota with pink angels dangling from the ceiling around huge simulated ice cream cones spinning over the central court; they hang giant green and gold banners at the Sunrise Mall in Massapequa; they come donning and blitzering with the Los Angeles Premier Chorale Strolling Christmas Medieval Feast Ceremony in Costume at Promenade Mall in California. And at Greengate Mall, they produce the Nutcracker.

I remember it was where I first told Santa what I wanted for Christmas,” remembered one of the commenters. “I always loved going to Greengate Mall with my parents. It seemed like the holidays weren't the holidays unless we had our usual trip to the mall to sit on Santa’s lap.”

Harry led the way to the enormous workroom where the actual displays were being built. Working from designs prepared by Walter Schwartz of the Design Group in New York City, men in green work clothes hammered and sawed, while high school girls with bright orange handled scissors in the back pockets of their jeans applied details to dozens of already completed components that would be assembled into a number of large displays. There were colorful wooden castles, cardboard arches, tubular towers and oversized boxes swaddled in shiny gift wrap. It was part Cecil B. De Mille, part junior prom.

"We build all our stuff right here," Overly explained. "We usually just build freestyle, but we're building from blueprints this year because the Rouse Company wants to be able to duplicate this at other malls next year. Other centers around here spend as much as we do or more, but they don't have as much to show."

Harry beamed at all the activity and introduced me to one of the men working on the displays who had the size and some of the appearance of John Wayne. In fact his name turned out to be John. "John's been here about as long as I have," Harry reminisced. "Yeah," John said laconically. "But I'm still poor."

Harry led me to center court where some of the decorations were already going up. The latest addition was the thirty five foot high artificial Christmas tree itself. Harry was going out to inspect it. It was late in the day; the mall was closed and mostly dark, although center court was brightly lit.

Harry looked up and around. "Everything looks great so far," he said to the congregation of management and maintenance staff, and others hired specifically for the Christmas decorating job. "Everything, except for that damn tree."

There was a certain nervous stirring among the assembled, who for the most part pretended to be doing something else. "I hate that tree," Harry said flatly. "Did you ever see a real tree like that? The branches don't stick out like branches."

He as assured that it would look more treelike when the branches were properly fluffed and decorated, but he was apparently unconvinced. The discussion among the inner circle of four or five moved on to other subjects, but Harry kept returning his gaze to the tree, and sour comments about it punctuated every couple of sentences.

Then Harry began to ask questions about a large decorative golden ring, several feet in diameter, suspended from the ceiling over center court. He wanted to know what size screws were holding it and where they were placed into the support beams and ceiling struts. He asked how much the ring weighed and how the weight was distributed.
"I don't want the damn thing to fall," he said. Everyone assured him that it couldn't possibly fall. The support was adequate for a much heavier load, many times what the ring weighed. The weight was evenly distributed. It had been checked and rechecked.

"If it falls, it wouldn't fall straight down," Harry continued, as if no one had spoken. He kept looking at the ring. "It would sway a little. Probably it would hit the train track and derail the train. Or it could hit a train full of kids."

By now everyone in center court was standing still and looking up at the ring. Someone else calculated how the ring would fall. It might hit the tree. Or sway into a storefront. But in fact Overly had already concluded that the ring was more than adequately supported, and with a wave and a final okay-and with everybody else still looking up at the ring-he began to walk back to his office, out of the circle of light in center court and into the semidarkness. "Somebody has to ask these questions," he said with a shrug.

Then in the shadows he stopped and turned back for a final look. "I hate that tree," he said.

“I remember lights in the food court that would change colors (yellow, blue, green, etc) during Christmas as Charlie Brown music would play.” “There was a puppet show that kids would huddle around and watch.”

Stacey Smith

In the management offices, Harry overheard a discussion between Karen and Stacey Smith, the mall's receptionist and Karen's assistant for the Christmas preparations. Stacey explained to Harry what had just happened: a truck she had dispatched from the mall to pick up a load of materials needed for the displays returned full, but with only half the boxes it was sent to fetch. There hadn't been enough room for the rest.

"I asked the guy at the warehouse how much there was," Stacey said, "and he told me that one small truck could carry it all." Now the warehouse was closed and the rest of the boxes wouldn't be available until after the weekend.

"What did I teach you?" Harry said quietly.

"I should have sent a bigger truck anyway?" Stacey said.

"No," Harry said. "What do I always say? Don't take anything for granted. You ask them: How many boxes are there? How big is each box? Is it big enough for a man to fit in it?...You ask questions."

This was another of Harry Overly's functions within the Rouse Company: to groom employees for larger responsibilities in other Rouse malls and for the main office in Columbia. After three or four years of tutelage and raffish abuse-known in the company as "Harry's School of Charm"-they would be ready for bigger jobs. Stacey and Karen were Harry's latest pupils; in fact, in a few months Karen would be moving on.

For now, however, they all had to deal with Harry. But Karen had already managed a modicum of revenge for Harry's mall-treatment. Every Christmas season, Harry Overly's rambling ranch homestead on a rural road near Greensburg becomes a local legend. White Christmas lights outline every inch of it, as well as the fences around the grounds and the Christmas figures (snowman, sleigh) scattered within. On the nights before Christmas, a costumed Santa (usually a Greengate employee) is posted at Harry's gate to give small gifts to children in the many cars that line up to see the decorated house, and to take donations for a local charity. Like townsfolk coming to the lord's castle, carloads of people come to his manor every year.

All of this is well known within the Rouse Company. On this particular evening at Greengate, after Harry had left, Karen was told that he'd made off with another box of the mall's Christmas lights for his house. So Karen told me about the corporate practical joke pulled on Overly at a meeting the previous year in Columbia, to which she had been a willing party.

Karen's part in the joke was to make a short film that her co-conspirators would show at the end of the company's conference on mall energy conservation, after all the statistics and graphs had been presented. Karen's film began with a shot of an extension cord being plugged into an outlet at Greengate mall. Then the cord was followed out of the room, winding down a supply tunnel and into the mall parking lot, then across the highway and down portions of various roads, until finally it snaked down a long driveway and was shown being connected to a string of Christmas lights.

The last shot was of Harry Overly's house, all lit up.

Many recalled riding the train through the snow-covered Christmas village. “I remember the animated deer with the jerky movements that built toys as kids rode through the display.” Another recalled a young adult perspective, of accompanying nieces and nephews, and watching “how big their eyes would be when they first walked into the center courtyard... Nothing made my parents more happy then seeing [the children] laugh as they went round and round on the train.”

"The snow is thinner this year," Karen told the fifty or so people gathered in the mall community room at three o'clock in the morning. "So be careful because once it tears, that's it." The crew-some regular mall part-timers mixed in with community college students majoring in retail and relatives of the mall staff-nodded, put down their soft drinks and coffee, and headed back to center court.

Karen Kozemchak's duties ranged from coordinating market studies and writing radio ads, to counting the number of staples that would be used in a year's promotions. Some malls have two or three people to do what she did. In fact, her immediate predecessor at Greengate had lasted about a month. One morning his resignation was found on his desk and he was never heard from again-he simply disappeared. But for Karen, no time was busier than these few weeks, and these few days in particular. While the decorations were going up, she would be at the mall for forty-eight continuous hours.

After Harry's unfavorable reaction to the tree, Karen began replacing lights and starting the fluffing process, getting up high in the basket of the Snorklelift 40-a big, noisy machine that extends a hydraulic arm upward and side to side from a tractor-like cab on wheels. Then the tree lights were tested in the silent mall, causing the fragments of glittery stuff dangling from the ceiling to spangle shadows across the darkened storefronts.

Then out of the shadows the parade of elves began. Boys in sweatshirts, girls in sweaters and fresh jeans, carried some of the thirty animated figures from the workroom and stacked them against the storefronts. Then they brought out the oversized gift-wrapped boxes-they were large but empty, so each elf could carry several. Those working at center court turned to see this prodigious parade and smiled.

Then a crew of strangers arrived to set up the tracks and kid-sized train. They were a motley crew that usually works for carnivals. "You crazy old man!" one of them would shout at the grizzled individual wearing a beat-up logo cap with bill turned up that said CHRISTY'S BAR BE QUE and an ancient T-shirt that said 4 x 4 FORD "You put the wheels on backwards!"

Karen watched them carefully, nursing a bottle of Squirt. "They're wild men," she said. Yet there was something absurdly evocative about them: large men hammering spikes into tiny ties, like some strange parody of the building of the railroad across the American West.

After the carnival crew disappeared back into the night, the next task was to lay a base of chicken wire over the entire court inside the train tracks. Then a crew of girls began cutting and laying down the Dacron snow carpet, inserting tiny lights underneath to create an effect of snow gently illuminated by moonlight.

This work continued after the 3 A.M. break. A girl gathered a string of tiny bulbs already turned on; she held them like a bouquet of light. Moving carefully through the webs of glass, two women stapled down the snow. Some of the girls walked on the snow carpets in their socks, but Karen and Stacey had come prepared: Stacey with a pair of white moccasins, Karen with brown.

Then the big displays were fitted together, installed, moved around and installed again. By five in the morning, the final elements were being added-the flags of starched felt, the hot-pink dusted Styrofoam balls. A boy threw loose plastic snow around the castle and towers, which were tubes covered with vinyl in shades of azalea and American Beauty rose. A man who has been wiring lights "inside" the Christmas tree, suddenly emerges through the bottom branches. One girl was off by herself, absorbed in arranging the Dacron snow carpet on a hill of wire, bending forward from the waist with her feet flat on the floor. Her work was as delicate and graceful as that supple physical movement, but also careful and deliberate. When she was finished, her particular area could not have looked more like wind-driven snow.

The work continued on through the morning-25,000 yards of ribbon, 150 pounds of diamond dust, 850 pounds of scattered snow, 4,000 sets of miniature lights, and 24,000 feet of snow blanket. Several crews came and went, working diligently, fighting fatigue, getting silly, getting angry, making friends.

The process was familiar to me from my participation in college stage plays: setting the lights, laying the cable and wiring, assembling the sets, moving things around, getting it all to look right, through the hours of labor and fatigue. The burly guys do the lifting, the girls do the work requiring patient attention and care, and the people in charge function as producers and directors, speaking with kindness but always rearranging and re-doing, never settling for less than perfection.

By early afternoon the towers were topped with snow cones, the figures were all in place and animated, and the train was moving smoothly through the displays with its first load of enchanted children aboard. Already customers were exclaiming and taking pictures. Some participants from earlier crews returned to look at the finished product. A television crew from a Pittsburgh station arrived to film the displays for the Greengate Christmas commercial, using the Snorklelift as a makeshift movie crane.
The official tree light-up occurred on the next weekend, followed a week later by the Christmas parade, with the Hempfield High School band and majorettes and color guard marching around the parking lot and through the mall. The parade ended in center court, where the Nutcracker (played in costume by Stacey) and the wooden soldiers cracked open the Nut, out which emerged, who else but Santa Claus.

The pay-off for all the hours of effort, all the quiet artistry and gimmickry, all the money and calculation and enthusiasm and care, was the ballet of cars at the traffic lights leading to the mall. As Christmas came nearer, there were constant lines on the highway, and lines of parents and children at center court to get into the miniature train, lines on the side court to get pictures taken with Santa, lines at the pizza place, and lines to the ladies' room.

It's the Christmas Paradise Parade, the Captivated Shopper's jingle of her ankle cuffs, the finest hour of the Retail Drama, when the customers dance after the Phillipe designer handbags, Pant-Her Coordinates, Bromley opossum-trimmed nylon coats, and misses' White Stag Outerwear, the Oneida flatware and Nikko Ming Tree twenty-piece service dinnerware, the oral water jets, Pastamatic 700, battery tooth polisher kits, energy boots, Crazy Foam, pulsar quartz watches, Fantasy Ultima II makeup kit complete with cell renewal lotion, plush-touch velours, Vanity Fair French Flirts, Swiss Army shirts, Maidenform Delectables, personalized blazer buttons, Izod Lacoste bicycle jackets in navy, kelly or eggplant, blueberry sleepware Jammies Nightshirts in a Jar, Wintuck orlon fisherman sweaters, the Buns Calendar, Ciao garment bags, ceramic pagodas, plus 20 percent off all chemical services at Great Expectations Hair Salon, their Christmas special.

Meanwhile, down the highway at Westmoreland Mall, flamenco Muzak plays as people line up at Orange Julius and at the glass elevator that goes from one floor to the other. One of the Star Wars soundtracks animates teenagers in Camelot Music, as well as their older siblings knotted in spontaneous reunions with dimly recalled high school classmates home for the holidays. The serious shoppers-heartbreaking young women with modified wedge haircuts and perms, their frankly svelte figures in pullover splitneck tops and black polyester-knit flared pants, each dragging three blond kids and a doubleknit sloppo husbands who looks like he's been drinking beer in a Laundromat for twenty years-are spinning through aisles of genuine walnut jewelry boxes with sardonyx Incolay stone tops, Infinity Model Qa speakers with optional pedestals, TV Action News Team dolls, financial planning programs, imitation Christian Dior velours, anti-cling crepeset lounging pajamas, wrap-tie shawl cardigans, electric crock pots, handsome wall dividers, multi-option video games...while old men sit on benches in the non-shade of the non-palm trees.

The sheer numbers are stimulating, exciting, from the rarely filled but now overflowing parking lot to the jammed courts where old acquaintance is renewed amidst the shopping din. All the elements that the mall manages start to click, and the energy takes over-people exciting people in a visual and aural riot of images. Products, colors, light, music and sentiment-they all make for the Retail Drama's big finish.
"It's a madhouse," one customer at Greengate said, not complaining. Another turned from the center court display. "Isn't it something?" she said. "Hurry up," her companion told her. "We've still got two more malls to hit today."

Native to This America: A Personal Journey

Statues in Pittsburgh commemorating a meeting between Seneca
leader Guyasuta and George Washington

Native to This America: A Personal Journey

The question of how we may become "native to this place" has fascinated me since I read Wes Jackson's book of that title.  A natural place to start for me was with the knowledge and cultural attitudes of peoples who were and are Native to these Americas, this western hemisphere.  Apart from the universals that unite indigenous peoples around the world, and are transferable or adaptable to how humans relate to their world even in the 21st century, I followed common feelings for the land I knew.  For though I am not a Native American, I am a native-born American, and have a strong feeling of belonging to this land--particularly that of the western Pennsylvania where I was born, grew up and spent part of my adulthood.  

What follows is an essay briefly explaining my own journey as it relates to Native America, which is the subject of the series of posts here that this one caps, or (if you're starting at the top and reading down) introduces.  I beg readers indulgence for repetitions from those previous/following articles, necessary to telling this story.  This is not the complete story by any means, but I hope it has a few useful things to say.

 My native grounds are in western Pennsylvania. I was born there, I grew up there, and after some years in various other places, I was living there again before I came to the North Coast of  California, where I've lived since the autumn of 1996. There are a few thousand American Indians in the Pittsburgh area, almost none of them from tribes indigenous to Pennsylvania. There is no reservations or Native land base in the entire state. The last recognized Native land disappeared under the waters of Kinzua Dam, which is the specific subject of Buffy Sainte Marie's famous and glorious protest song, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone."

But a long time ago there were many Native cultures there. The archeological site that documents the oldest human habitation in the U.S., beginning some 16 to 18 thousand years ago, is in western Pennsylvania, at a place called Meadowcroft, which appeared to have been a resting place, possibly after the hunt, for countless generations.

Much of the 18th century history involving Indians and the British, French and then Americans, occurred in Pennsylvania. The first tribe to negotiate a treaty with the new U.S. government was the Lenni Lenape (Delaware) in Pennsylvania; in 1778 in Pittsburgh, they signed an agreement that would have created a fourteenth state, to be populated and governed by the Indian nations. But the Continental Congress failed to ratify the treaty.

Growing up, there were whiffs of all this for a boy living in an in-between place: on the edge of a small town where the young George Washington had changed his horses, but with woods and fields that hadn't yet been turned into suburbs and shopping centers. Although that landscape was still scarred by old mines and had long ago been logged, it had patches of wildness and wildlife.

I remember when I was 10 or so, walking an unusual distance (though in a year or two it would be at the end of my first paper route) with some older boys from the neighborhood, into a patch of woods near Mt. Odin Park (a popular picnic area), up Toll Gate Hill. We searched for and believed we found Indian arrowheads. One of the older boys pointed to a rusting frame of metal, and claimed it was the remnant of a Conestoga wagon. Though it all appealed to my boyish imagination, neither the arrowheads nor wagon (though it was more likely a decayed Ford) were implausible. We were in fact walking where many had walked and traveled for untold years. Toll Gate Hill had been a real toll gate along the main road from Pittsburgh east to Fort Ligonier in George Washington's time. Nearby Route 30 traced that wagon and horseback route, which in turn traced a primary Native trail. Many years later, I saw a map of the many other trails that had crisscrossed this area. It wasn't all romantic illusion: there were spirits in those woods.

That particular trail also led to Bushy Run, some six miles west, where an improbable battle in 1764 ended the ongoing siege of Fort Pitt and the last organized threat to non-Native expansion. This was "the west" then, and non-Native hegemony had not been a sure thing.

Senecas and Delawares had surrounded Fort Pitt, and told the English there that they had convinced the Six Nations Confederacy not to attack the fort so the besieged families inside could leave. Instead the English made a gift to the Indians of blankets deliberately infected with smallpox. This was not a story we were told in school.

The western Pennsylvania landscape is made up of soft rounded hills, some of them steep, and valleys, some of them long, some of them deep. There were still lots of trees. I grew up in a house on a hill facing east, with a view of the entire town, and beyond it the blue skyline of the Appalachian foothills. Directly across our new street (I saw it graduate from dirt tamped down with oil in the summer, to covered with crushed stones called "red dog," before it was finally paved) was a patch of woods, where I spent a lot of my time.

I mention this because of a moment in college that made a major impression on me. Objectively, it wasn't much---just something that a visiting lecturer said in passing, as I sat in a crowd of students and faculty, politely more or less listening. This was some 800 miles west, in western Illinois. While talking about something else (I don't remember the topic) he happened to mention that some Native peoples prayed over an animal they had just killed for food, thanking the animal's spirit for the gift of this sustenance.

I remember being so struck by this that I left the room to think about it. Suddenly so many feelings came back. I'd had just enough contact with life and death in nature to have been impressed as a child with the paradox of taking life to sustain life. I'd also had a religious education that had nothing to say about any personal relationship to the natural world, even though I had strong feelings about the landscape, certain trees and rocks, and animals. I'd also grown up with the usual mix of romantic notions about Indians, but at least I had some idea of their closeness to nature.

Now I had heard something that made perfect sense, that recognized the apparent paradox as natural, and what was natural as a profound and religious mystery.  An earth-centered religious mystery, which seemed--and still seems--the most appropriate.  Of all the wonders that transcend us, the clearest and most important to sustaining our lives, are the wonders of the earth and its elements.

At the end of the 60s I found myself in Berkeley, California with a houseful of hippies, including one old friend from college and a northern California Indian named David. I seem to remember he was Yurok. I live now pretty near Yurok country and know people with a Yurok lineage, but at the time David was just a hippie among the rest of us hippies in our psychedelic mix of Midwestern Protestant, Middle Atlantic Catholic, East Coast Jew, and a young woman from New England named Priscilla.

It was David's little yellow school bus we painted in psychedelic colors, and took on our coastal adventures. Hey, David, are you out there?  There was one thing that seemed different about David I recall.  All of us had complicated relationships to our families and homes, obviously including rebellion.  David disappeared for several days once, and I remember talking to him at the kitchen table on the early morning he returned.  He'd had a sudden need to go back north and visit his father.  It seemed to me there was something different about his connection to his home and family, that I've since come to recognize in other young people from Native families.  

But my interest in Native American cultures didn't become focused until 1992, the 500th anniversary of Columbus, when there was an explosion of awareness nationally.  It was about then that I started to explore the Native history and contemporary life in Pittsburgh where I was then living, after many years in other parts of the country, and in western Pennsylvania generally (the city is about 35 miles from where I grew up.)  It was also then that I began exploring contemporary Native American literature.

Actually, the literature exploration was sparked by the Pittsburgh research, when I met two (non-Native) teachers at the University of Pittsburgh who were teaching one of the few courses anywhere on Native American literature.  They got me started with Leslie Marmon Silko and others.  Later, in central Pennsylvania where a great deal of history involving Natives and Europeans transpired, I came upon a unique cache of books at a used bookstore, including several remarkable collections of short stories by Native writers.  Not even my frenzied forays into the used or bargain areas of bookstores in Seattle, Portland and Vancouver yielded such a mindblowing find.

But I must also mention some "bridge" writers, who took me from my own cultural preconceptions and moved me towards better understanding the Native writers I then read: non-Native writers like Gary Snyder and Bruce Chatwin, and even apparently fake Native writers like Jamake Highwater, whose The Primal Mind nevertheless spoke to me.  I also benefited greatly from non-Native writers who took me on their journeys deep into Native cultures, like Richard Nelson (Make Prayers to the Raven) and Keith Basso (Wisdom Sits in Places.)

The results of my Pittsburgh explorations are reproduced on this site, in two articles published in local newspapers. I met the founder of the Council of Three Rivers American Indian Center, Russell Simms, who is Cherokee and Seminole. I met Alice Hartshorn, who came from Texas; Marwin Begaye, a young full-blooded Navajo activist and artist (whose work is now nationally known) and Miguel Sague, from central America, and started attending his full moon ceremonies and other events where he talked about the spirituality of his people.



Miguel with a more recent sweatlodge


Thanks to Miguel, I later participated in my first sweat lodge. Miguel said his tradition believed in spreading their knowledge, and our participation was part of his pledge to himself that wherever he was, he would conduct the full moon, solstice and equinox ceremonies of his tradition. Just before we left, my partner Margaret and I were asked to serve on the board of the Caney Indian Spiritual Circle. Miguel's salsa band played for a surprise party at a Pittsburgh restaurant I organized for Margaret's birthday, the last gathering of our Pittsburgh friends.

These Native people and others I met for the story I did for a local weekly, as well as the fiction, essays and interviews I was reading by contemporary Native writers, gave me the beginning of a feel for contemporary Native life in North America. I learned to approach both contemporary and historical information with humility and openness, for I was also learning why contemporary Native people are a bit skeptical of non-Native interest. It has often resulted in enthusiasm without understanding, and at worst, exploitation and cultural theft.

Some of the Indians I met in Pittsburgh were native-born western Pennsylvanians, as I was. But none of them were from tribes that were Native to that place. They were not part of the history and cultures I was reading about in the past of my home land. I did see some dances of the Seneca and Delaware demonstrated by the Allegeny River Dancers from a reservation in New York. But that's as close as I came, outside the few books on the subject, notably Indians in Pennsylvania, by Paul A. W. Wallace (which Russell Simms said seemed pretty accurate.)

All the feelings I had for the woods and landscape where I grew up were given new grounding and meaning in Wallace's descriptions of Seneca, Shawnee, Wynadot, Creek and Delaware life, and before them the fabled Monogahela People: they lived in the region for centuries, but by the time the Europeans arrived they were gone: some say they dispersed, some say they essentially died out owing to the diseases the Europeans brought to the coast, to which Indians had no immunity, spread inland by trading and traveling Indians, so this culture was eradicated as a consequence of invaders they never saw. The vast majority of American Indians who perished after contact died of these diseases.

My own residual feelings for the scraps of natural landscape I experienced, and the nature of the place (the contours and colors, the weather, the air itself) found an order and meaning in Wallace's descriptions of, for example, how Delaware children were raised. They were respected and cherished, and their education was a community responsibility. They were taught woodcraft and gardening, a knowledge of plants and animals, and the tribal legends and traditions, and religious beliefs.

"The basic principle of Delaware religion was that spirit was the prime reality," Wallace writes. "All things had souls: not only man, but also animals, the air, water, trees, even rocks and stones." Another scholar observed that the Delaware "trod lightly through his natural environment, merging himself sympathetically into the world of living and non-living things."

Here was the essence of what resonated so strongly in me when I heard that speaker at college: first, the sense of aliveness in everything, that every element of the world is sacred and has soul; second, the deep acceptance of the complexity, even the tragedy, inherent in human relationship to other life, particularly the fact that we live by killing and consuming life. The religion I was used to didn't really confront this, and the thinking of the non-Native world was one-sided (there was no problem because only humans have souls) or they dealt with this paradox that every child feels when we see a dying animal, by avoiding it, by denial.

For the Delaware who lived where I had lived, the place of humans in the universe was dramatized in the chief annual ritual, the Big House Ceremony, held over twelve days and nights in October. A wooden structure of perhaps 50 by 30 feet, the Big House was as symbolic as it was solid: its floor was the earth, with the underworld below. Its four walls were the four directions; its ceiling the sky dome, with the home of the creator above. At the center of the house was a post, symbolizing the World Tree. Along the floor from the east door to the west was the winding White Path, along which the dancers danced, solemnly following the path of life with its twists and turns from birth to death, around the World Tree.

A few years later I researched and wrote another article, about the little known fact that many non-Natives in those 18th century days of contact, were deeply impressed by Native life. There were even people known as white Indians, usually captives who were so absorbed in Native life that they remained or returned, even after being "rescued" (many had to brought back to white society by force, and they promptly escaped back.) Part of the reason was Native spirituality, and the strength of the cultures based on it. One man who lived five years with the Delaware wrote: "As a nation they may be considered fit examples for many of us Christians to follow. "They certainly follow what they are taught to believe right more closely, and I might say more honestly, in general, than we Christians do the divine precepts of our Redeemer....I know I am influenced to good, even at this day, more from what I learned among them, than what I learned among people of my own color."

Also around this time, I decided to use a free Peoples Express airline ticket for a trip to Seattle and Vancouver. I'd visited Vancouver for the first time in the late 1980s for speaking engagements resulting from my book (The Malling of America) but I never got to spend much time exploring. I had an old friend there (who had passed through that house in Berkeley hippie days) and we'd gotten reacquainted on one of those speaking gigs, so she would be my Vancouver area guide.

We were racing around the city one day and got to the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology late in the afternoon. We had less than a half hour before closing, but those few minutes changed my life. It was the first time I'd seen the dramatic Northwest Coast Native art, expressed mostly in wood: in painted masks, canoes, boxes and implements, and most dramatically of all, totem poles. This Museum was a wonder of this art. They also had some contemporary examples of masks and paintings, and a large sculpture, the first attempts in many years to revive these traditions and return them to the highest quality of the best work of the past.

I learned the sculpture was by Bill Reid, and later that another Northwest Coast artist, Robert Davidson, was becoming prominent. It took maybe a year, but I managed finally to get an assignment to write about them from Smithsonian Magazine. Bill Reid was pretty ill by then, but there was a major retrospective of Robert Davidson's work at the Museum of Civilization across the river from Canada's capital. I went there, met Davidson and his brother, Reg, also an artist. (Reg invited me to Haida Gwaii, also known as the Queen Charlotte island, for salmon fishing in the fall. I've always regretted not being able to take him up on that.)

I later spent a week hanging out at Robert Davidson's studio near Vancouver. I spent many hours with him there, and a few at his home. We went to a movie together (Schindler's List.) It was all a rich experience, and I continued to explore and admire that art, even after my story ran in 1995.

In many ways, to move to the North Coast a year later was a large dislocation in my life, but there were a few elements of logic to it. One was the forests, another the presence of indigenous cultures. Within my first few years here I got involved in work for both.  Some of it was directly for or on behalf of Native organizations (such as The Seventh Generation Fund), and some of it was reporting--the major examples of which are preserved on this site.  My work has moved in different directions in recent years, but it sometimes circles back.  The resulting influences on me might be a subject for another time.  But this much should at least help place the related pieces reproduced here in a personal context.