Written by Peter Forbes, "Another Way of Being Human" is a chapter taken from the forthcoming book of collected essays, As if the Future Mattered: Visions of a New American Dream, (Beacon Press, Fall 2002. For more information, please email the Center For Land and People.

I have heard others say that we are deep into a Great Forgetting, a time when our relationships are so fractured that we have almost forgotten why they were important in the first place. We have nearly said the final good-bye, having long since shaken hands, and are just now waiting to shut the door. But not quite. We hear a piece of music, and feel a deep unexplained stirring inside of us. We climb a mountain in the fall, and are swept away by the beauty. Our love for this land, this life, all of life, has us by the throat even when we don't have the words to speak.

For the first time in their lives, many Americans have said to themselves this year "The world I knew is gone." Our nation has felt a collective and breathtaking sense of loss. That loss is compounded by the memory of a different loss that gets played out every day across America: the loss of a cherished childhood landscape, a family farm, a forest, the grizzly bear, the loss of ways of life, the loss of life itself. "The world I knew is gone." I hold these words as a talisman for our era. They are the single idea that land conservation most competes against.

  Among the many messages that floated out on the internet in the fall of 2001 was this one from Rabbi Michael Lerner: "What is it in the way that we are living, organizing our societies, and treating each other that makes violence seem plausible to so many people? This is a world so out of touch with itself, filled with people who have forgotten how to recognize and respond to the sacred in each other because we are so used to looking at others from the standpoint of what they can do for us." There is a gift buried in the rubble of September 11. It is this. If we choose, we will never be the same again. The Japanese haiku poet Masahide wrote, "The barn has burned to the ground. Now I can see the moon."

Sorrow can create wisdom; great action can come out of profound loss. There is a chance for us to ask ourselves very hard questions that can elevate what it means to be human, and change the purpose of why we conserve land.

What is the relevance of land conservation in a world that produced September 11th? What is our highest vision, our deepest wisdom, for our communities? What might we be ignoring today that will be the heartache of future generations? Finally, and most painfully, having watched people die, how do we now want to live?

Many of the answers to these questions relate directly to our human relationship with the land. Our relationship to land can be an awakening. It's a re-kindling of what is most meaningful inside each of us. Conservation is a way for humans to re-engage with the world around us, a way of extending our best definitions of our humanity.

I prefer to believe that we are on the brink of a Great Remembering, a time when America's prosperity allows us to reconsider what matters most to us, when we are punished enough by "The world I know is gone" that we can find the bravery to show self-restraint and self-love. The path to the great remembering is through the healing of land conservation and the healing of ourselves, through a million different ways to show our forbearance and to reconnect with the life that is around us.

The difficulties that Americans came to face on September 11, and probably will face for the foreseeable future, really are not political or military. They are moral, which is to say that they concern the human heart and soul. This is truly not about war or retaliation. This is a crisis about personal and national integrity, autonomy and freedom, hope, awareness, and trust. How and where do we get these values today?

We get them from our families, from our beliefs, and from our connection to all of life on this earth. I have seen how the act of conserving land has brought into people's moral universe a renewed sense of justice, meaning, respect, joy and love, and made people feel more complete. Terry Tempest Williams began her essay, Testimony, with this question: "What do we wish for? To be whole. To be complete."

And, so, what is the role of land and place in making whole, complete people?

Our relationship to land is certainly not the only answer to all of our problems. It would be naive to suggest this, but it must be the first answer. Land is the foundation of our cultural house. And place tells us a great deal about what is good and healthy about ourselves. Anyone who doubts that we still get our most fundamental cultural information from the land should drive out to your closest strip mall, stand in front of it, and ask themselves "what does this place say about me?" Or, as the Amish ask it, what will this place do to my family? What we choose to do with our landscape becomes, fundamentally, what we choose to do to ourselves.

How many farms and local forests can we lose before we lose ourselves? How much loss of human experience can we survive and still call ourselves human?

We must consider the act of land conservation as a proud form of civil disobedience that quietly but steadfastly opposes the prevailing cultural forces of our times. Our true wealth or security isn't in our bank accounts, but comes from the stories about the people and places in our lives; our health and security comes from our relationships.

And the act of conservation is the process of telling this story. It is the mystery, the unexplainable love that brings people out of their homes to protect the farms, rivers, and mountains of their lives. The favorite farm or local swimming hole doesn't necessarily contain any known threatened species of plant or animal, but its loss would mean an extinction of human experience. And people know it, even though it's not something that can be proven by science. And the struggle to protect that place becomes our own dance of hope and sorrow.

I have seen strangers come to realize something greater for their neighbors and themselves. To save a piece of land, people re-think their future not in terms of what they could do for themselves but in terms of what they could do for others. They are building rootedness, based on their sense of service toward one another and the land. To act on such feelings is the essence of citizenship and moves us from isolation to community. It is the story, unfolding before our eyes, of how land conservation can tear down the walls that divide people from themselves, from one another, and from nature and thus become the starting point for a renewed community life. And in conservation's success, everyone feels joy and also responsibility, freedom as well as obligation.

Our determination to protect, and re-create when necessary, the places we love the most calls upon us to make sacrifices, to express our dissent and our hopes in ways that many of us have never before been asked to do. Aldo Leopold envisioned all of this. Writing more than fifty years ago he said, "conservation is one of the squirmings which foreshadow this act of self-liberation."

Let us begin to think of land conservation, then, truly as an act of self-liberation. Self-liberation from ways of living that deny us meaning, purpose and joy. Self-liberation from a pattern of destructiveness that threatens our very lives. Speak these American place names to yourself: Androscoggin, Bear-Paw, Bitter Root, Black canyon, Catawba, Blue Ridge Foothills, Congaree, Elkhorn Slough, Frenchman Bay, Hollow Oak, Keweenah, Gathering Waters, Lummi Island, Modanock, Otsego, Prickly Pear, Tecumseh, Wolf River. These places speak of our history. They are the waters, the food, the wood, the dreams, and the memories that literally make up our bodies. They are our alchemy of land, people, and story. When we can protect these places that define us, we give ourselves the gift of pathos, memory and connection. These places give us a hold in the world. These are the natural places that inspire our thinking, replenish our souls, and remind us that where we live is like no other place in the world.

The poet Edward Young asked of our era "Born originals, how comes it to pass that we all die copies?"

The terrifying story of our culture is that everything is beginning to look the same. This world of ours wants a monoculture: plantations of pines and people. For too many of us, this has become a world where the point of trees is board feet, the point of farms is money, and the point of people is to be consumers. We learn that the only story that matters is the one playing in your head, that the only land that matters is what you own, that the only person that matters is yourself, and that the only time that matters is now. I think this is the source of the crisis that Rabbi Lerner is warning us about.

The work of saving land is to tell a different story about America, that we value diversity, that we can show our restraint, that we seek to re-engage with the world around us on peaceful terms, that we have many definitions of our humanity, that our values as a people include sacrifice, humility, respect, joy and love. Conservation is self-determination and the tangible, highly visible expression of our own ethics of enough.

To save land is to suggest how me might better live; where humans are not the only measure of things, where humans are defined more so by their fairness and compassion.

These are core values that most people want, but aren't easy to live by today. The values left in our hearts by land conservation are bigger and more important than we can imagine. They are bigger than we can possibly count in acres. They are bigger, even, than can be expressed in the saving the endangered lives of species other than our own. These values given to us by a connection to land are so important that they stand to re-define what it means to be human in this century.

Land conservation is helping communities to address racial tensions, to plan more effectively, to learn more about one another, and to strengthen local economies. The struggle over land enables people to tackle other struggles. I call this the transformative power of land conservation: shining a light on the larger meaning of our forbearance and seeing how it can change who we are and how we live.

I now understand that land conservation is a community's process of telling a story about itself. And it often raises questions of mythic proportions. How do we want to be? Do we surrender fully to a culture defined by self-preservation and the expectation of rewards? Do we define ourselves by apathy and self-interest, or by love, self-restraint and a sense of service?

How do we get there?

Albert Einstein said, "No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that created it." I hope our consciousness can evolve to re-think land conservation as the conservation of relationships. Let's work toward a new radical center where the value of protecting the tiniest urban lot and the largest tract of wilderness are viewed together, through the lens of how well they build relationships: dependencies and reliances between people, between species, between the whole of the land community. This isn't saving land without people. And this isn't saving land for people. The radical center calls for saving land and people. We might call this "land and people conservation."

Today, most of America is saying "just protect us" and I understand that fear. But our prosperity and security as people and as members of the natural world can only be determined by the quality of our relationships with the world around us, and not by any other measure of wealth or security. This is true for every species of life on this planet.

But there is no single science or philosophy to help us protect the relationships between people and the land. Unlike conservation biology, this work of protecting ways of life, or habitats for people, has no highly defined project selection criteria. It includes growing healthy food, having safe parks and clean rivers accessible to people, building relationships with the land that inspire our sense of ethics and art, maintaining a culture of mutual-aid and an appreciation of local beauty, defining our limits as responsible creatures, protecting our cultural and ethnic diversity --all of which contribute immeasurably to the health and well-being of all species on this planet.

Through this new lens, our actions with the land will be right or wrong not because a law tells us so but because they either enhance or diminish our opportunity for relationships with all that lives on the land. A positive act of land conservation is one that strengthens the relationship between people and the land and the values taught by that relationship. A negative, or at best neutral, act of land conservation is one that does not.

The quality and character of the connections that we can have are as diverse as the land itself. For example, our relationship with wilderness shows our forbearance and respect; our relationship to a working ranch speaks of our commitment, and patience. Once again, our strengths as a people will emerge from the quality of our relationships with the land, including our sense of care, well being, neighborliness, trustworthiness, and health. And it will be equally clear how many of our weaknesses as a culture grow from our inability to develop a connection with a place.

We need new guiding principles for land conservation.

Imagine, for a moment, that the purpose of conserving land is to help create a new kind of people. Imagine that the human being as it was meant to be - fully expressed, joyful, innately responsible- is an endangered species that truly needs a healthy natural habitat.

This vision for land conservation suggests that our highest goal might just be to help people think and act differently.

"Land and people" conservation gives us hope of finding a way for all of us to be at home on the land no matter where we live or how long we've lived there. It gives us a powerful new benchmark for land conservation, where the alchemy of human cooperation, activism, and the wild leads people to dwell and imagine differently, to find their own souls.

And it will also be a force in helping us to find the soul of our nation.

Thankfully, there are hundreds of examples where land conservation is bringing people together with the earth and restoring a sense of empathy for all of life.

Glenn and Kathy Davis are learning Hawaiian traditions and rebuilding Hawaiian culture by bring young Hawaiians back to the Taro fields. Glen told me "now that we've really come back and are committed to the taro again, there are more birds singing in the jungle. The water is flowing again. We have come home."

The Nez Perce are using land and the natural world as a source of cultural and personal healing. It's direct evidence, also, of the power of land conservation to create social change. They are proving that the best way for the Nez Perce to fight drug-abuse and alcoholism is to restore the salmon, and to bring back the wolves, and to ride across the land on their own Appaloosa.

Classie Parker lives in Harlem just a few blocks from the hospital where she was born. For many years, Classie felt stuck on a street where no one knew anyone else and drug dealers ran everything. She especially feared for her father, who was growing old and needed a way to stay active and get outside. She worried that he would die alone in a building where nobody cared. In 1992, Classie's apartment stood adjacent to a 3,600-square-foot vacant lot that was crowded with crack vials, needles, abandoned cars, and garbage of every kind. When Classie got the idea to create a garden on that lot for her father to work in, she recruited her brother and a Hispanic couple who lived nearby and their five children to help her. Classie had a vision for a place where the old and young could work together. Today, the thriving garden there is called "Five Star," in honor of the five adults and five children who started it.

One very hot Saturday in July, I found myself on 121st Street in Central Harlem trying to get perspective. For an hour or more I sat on the corner of Frederick Douglass Avenue eating peaches and taking in the neighborhood. There was constant motion everywhere: motorcycles racing each other down the avenue, vendors selling sunglasses and old record albums, children playing games at my feet, endless flows of people. But amid all the noise and pavement , there was a quiet green garden. An eight-foot-high chain-link fence could barely keep the sunflowers from pouring out into 121st Street. With two large townhouses protecting either flank, the garden itself was just plain bold and beautiful. A dozen discarded lawn chairs had been retrieved and organized loosely around leaning tables and empty crates as if a card game or a good meal had just been finished. I could see rows of corn, plots of vegetables, climbing snap peas, grapevines, fruit trees, and a dogwood. I could hear birds. Men and women of all ages were hanging on the chain-link fence talking to friends on the street, and then quickly turning back into the garden with a hoe or a laugh.

Five Star is breathtakingly beautiful and heavy with life. It is stewardship and wildness wrapped together and dropped down on 121st Street. Classie produces food, beauty, tolerance, neighborliness, and a relationship to land for people throughout her part of Harlem, all on less than one-quarter of an acre. Five Star Garden is almost absurdly small, but for the people of 121st Street - who, for the most part, never leave Harlem - the garden is their own piece of land to which they have developed a very deep personal attachment. These are Classie's words:

There's love here. People gonna go where they feel the flow of love. There is a difference. You come in here and sit down, don't you feel comfortable with us? Don't you feel you're free to be you? That we're not going to judge you because you're a different color or because you're a male? Do you feel happy here? Do you feel intimidated? Don't you feel like my dad's your dad?

What can conservationists learn from Classie Parker and Five Star Garden? At The Trust for Public Land, we ask ourselves what connects our acts of conservation at a place like Five Star Garden in central Harlem with a landscape like the Columbia River Gorge in Oregon and Washington. The gorge is a large, majestic ecosystem, home to a great diversity of species, and it offers humans a physical experience, a potent reminder of the inspirational power of wildness to nurture the body and soul. If we define conservation success in terms of acres, the distinctions between the two are obvious and enormous. If we are committed solely to biological diversity, the gorge has something very important to offer while Five Star Garden does not. If we enjoy the debates between wilderness and stewardship, there's an argument for both the gorge and Five Star Garden.

And if we are interested in sociology, Five Star Garden is the perfect example of a human relationship to land that is transforming a community. And yet all these explanations and ways of defining success are ultimately inadequate for the future of land conservation. None examines the whole of life, and therefore each perpetuates an unstable system. We must instead strive toward a new radical center where the tiniest urban lot and the largest tract of wilderness are viewed through the lens of a new objective, a new aspiration for land conservation. As Thoreau put it, "new earths, new themes demand us!" The theme for this new aspiration for land conservation is relationship.

Lynn Sherrod sits across from us with her back to a large picture window that allows us to look straight out across hundreds of acres of pasture to distant Elk Mountain near Routt National Forest in northwestern Colorado. A band of large cottonwoods lining the Elk River cuts through the middle of this view. Lynn was born and raised in this valley and her grandmother homesteaded on the flats nearby. Now Lynn runs a commercial cow-calf operation with her husband, Delbert. They have worked this specific piece of land for nearly twenty-five years, and Lynn can't stop herself from turning and gazing out over the ranch every few minutes. It is constantly in her mind, in her vision of the world.

One of Lynn's hobbies, in part to keep her sanity, is to take pictures of for sale signs and the huge ranch gates that have sprung up in Elk Valley over the last ten years. Steamboat Springs, twenty minutes up the road, was once a cow town filled with homesteaders and ranchers but is now home to millionaires and weekend skiers. A 240-acre ranch abutting the Sherrods' land sold, sight unseen, over the Internet for $10,000 an acre. (It wasn't a rancher who bought that land.) A 3,500-acre spread that had been a cornerstone of the ranching community sold for $10.2 million to an investor from California.

The good news, Lynn told us, is that the new owner has put a conservation easement over the ranch. There's part of Lynn that is particularly happy about this, because she and her fellow ranchers in Elk Valley are the force behind the Colorado Cattlemen's Land Trust, one of the country's first land protection organizations to emerge from the traditional ranching community. She believes that the fragmentation of working ranches into recreational "ranchettes" is killing her community. Keeping the land in large parcels protects the opportunity for ranching in the future. It's also very positive for biodiversity. But she has another concern. She knows that a conservation easement may protect the land but won't necessarily protect the culture that has lived on and loved that land. All the ranchers expressed the poignant hope that their own lives will not be replaced with lifestyles.

One rancher told us, "Second-home people don't come here to be neighbors, they come here to get away." By this, she didn't intend to be unfriendly but merely to point out the reality that the investor from California won't be likely to volunteer on the local school board or ambulance squad, be available to help Lynn and Delbert get their hay in, be willing to swap machinery, or even get their mail at the local post office. Lynn is acutely aware that their land trust, in the process of saving land, may be creating a museum for a way life that once was - and that it's her own life that will be on display.

The community of Yampa Valley is a powerful place to consider the success of conservation in terms of relationships. Much of the Yampa Valley is surrounded by public land managed either by the Forest Service or by the Bureau of Land Management. I asked several people to explain the difference between ranchland and public land. To a person, the differences were described not in terms of the quality of the land but the quality of the relationship. Jay Fetcher, a rancher along the Elk River, told us, "We feel a lifelong responsibility to our land, while you're never more than a visitor to public land. This land is us, so we take much better care of it." Another rancher in an adjoining valley said, "one relationship is about appreciation and the other is about responsibility. I think most folks really appreciate the national forest, but this land here is in my blood. I am responsible for it."

In the Yampa Valley and everywhere else, the enduring value of the relationship to the land might best be measured by the extent to which it evolves beyond self-interest. All healthy relationships entail sacrifice and are never solely about what makes one person feel good, but are about what's also good for someone else. Relationship implies a responsibility that goes beyond one's own dreams. Wendell Berry put it this way: "to grow up is to go beyond our inborn selfishness and arrogance; to be grown up is to know that the self is not a place to live."

Viewing land conservation as the conservation of relationships forces our culture to become more aware of itself, because the only way to make choices between right and wrong is to debate together - much more than we have - to determine what our culture needs in order to be healthy and to act out of wisdom. What sort of natural habitats - from wilderness to riparian corridors to working landscapes - do we humans need in order to create a healthy, responsible culture? What are the forces in our world that make our culture unhealthy?

Healthy life requires a relationship to other healthy life. We long for a bold vision that makes seamless and whole the story of how Classie Parker working the soil in Harlem is connected to Lynn Sherrod, working the soil in the Yampa Valley of Colorado. And we hunger to understand the complexity of all the ways of living in between because it offers us the chance to make our own lives whole. To live fully, people need a direct relationship to nature in working landscapes, in state parks, in urban gardens and in millions of backyards. And, yet, we must also cultivate the wild in our own nature by ensuring the complete wildness in some parts of the land. Today, it's not clear that anyplace is beyond the reach of our dominant ideology, which makes our acts of awareness and restraint even more important, even more profound. Without wilderness, there will be no place for the non-human world to live fully. And for us, achieving a relationship to both working landscapes and wilderness is the only way to find that state of communion with the world for which we all hunger.

A great lesson was taught to me recently by a senior colleague at TPL who said during a retreat, "How do I live with what I cannot do?" We can only try to accept gracefully our own inadequacies while doing the best that we can, and embrace the fact that everything changes. Nothing is permanent; nothing, truly, can be set-aside in perpetuity. This is difficult for many conservationists to accept; their idealism leads them to want to save the world by keeping things as they are today. But when all species die, they bequeath to their successors a slightly changed environment.

All of our religions and philosophies and all of our scientific understandings acknowledge change. The land will change, by our own hands or not, and some of the places we love will be lost, but if our relationships to the earth are ever gaining in insight and leading us to new awareness, we can restore portions of what has been lost. We can make amends. If we can accept the idea of impermanence - that all life does change - we might be better prepared to focus on our relationship to land as much as we focus on the land itself. In this new light, land conservation would have as part of its mission the notions of sympathy, building health and well being, and reducing suffering much more than the goal of keeping land the same.

Diversity

We need biological diversity on the planet for the same reasons we need all forms of diversity. Diversity creates empathy, stability, and morality. Simply put, we cannot know unity without first knowing diversity. Land conservation strikes an essential chord of meaning and fairness when it explicitly promotes diversity of all types: biological, cultural, racial, and socio-economic. To live by a credo of diversity, conservationists must work in diverse geographies, serve diverse peoples, be sympathetic to diverse relationships with the land, seek to work beyond the boundaries of their mission, and be constituted of diverse peoples. Through our work, we are always transferring to the public not just land but empowerment itself. At the heart of land conservation, by definition, is the obligation that all involved look beyond their immediate families to the needs of the larger community of life. Conservation, therefore, is first and foremost, against self-interest. And if land conservation is about citizenship, then it must equally be about changing existing power structures. Through this fundamental commitment to diversity, conservation builds awareness, strength, and principle.

Good Work

Whether carried out by a logger in a forest or a lawyer in an office tower, all forms of work ultimately affect the land. In this important sense, no one is divorced from the land and all share equally in its future.The conservation movement is quick to talk about recreation but is most often silent on work. Yet, the place where we live and the work that we do forge many of our beliefs. Good work is fundamental to the human experience and, therefore, a critical component of any conservation philosophy that hopes to influence our culture. For land conservationists to promote good work, we need to use our resources to aid what remains of our land-based culture. Simultaneously, we need to allow examples of good work to thrive on our "protected" landscapes. We need to constantly search for projects that go beyond recreation or leisure to encompass how people provide for themselves. Some conservation organizations are espousing notions of good work by protecting farmland or allowing green timber harvesting on their lands. Others are investing in fishing and farming cooperatives and making small financial loans to build businesses along greenways. These activities build deeper human relationships with the whole land community by demonstrating how all types of work can reinforce people's connection to the land.

Food

What we eat and drink is our most important daily relationship to the land. Given that one-quarter of America's land base is in some form of agriculture and that the far majority of this is industrial and destructive of both land and people, the single most important change that land conservationists can make is to focus on improving how we grow healthy, local food. We can use our skills and resources to better support farmers who use nature as the measure. Land conservation can help good farming by helping to keep farms affordable and intact, by encouraging community-supported agriculture and organic farms. We can support good harvesting practices on land and water by using our money and skills to keep access affordable, to financially support cooperatives of green producers, and to use our land to keep community intact. We can celebrate food that is unique to our regions, food that says something about us and reminds us that ours is like no other place in the world.

Movement

We are a migratory species, and the fullness of our souls is reached when we can see and feel our landscape on our own scale. The ability to walk, bike, ride horseback, and canoe the furthest possible distances creates a sense of freedom that is not unlike wildness, even though these activities might take us through a suburb or even a city. And the same need for movement and migration applies to the more-than-human world that needs wildlife corridors. Experiencing the land using our own muscles, moving at a slower pace than we normally do, and engaging our sight and smell and consciousness make us loyal to that place. Largely as result of Benton MacKaye's 1921 vision for a continuous Appalachian Trail from Georgia to Maine, there are now many other footpaths, greenways, ski trails, and kayaking and canoe trails that allow Americans to cover hundreds of miles of their native region by their own ingenuity and knowledge of the land.

History

History is the difference between land and place - place being the union of land with people and their stories. By conserving places out of our past, we learn metaphors and stories that help us find our way in the future. Because of this relationship granted to us through an act of conservation, we have the opportunity for pathos, memory, and connection. In protecting a 200-year-old boat shop, or one of the last herring smokehouses, or the boyhood home of Dr. Martin Luther King, we interject into the conservation of natural resources the story of social resources. Critical questions emerge that shape and guide us. What is the role of work and way of life to conservationists? What is the connection between civil rights and the environment?

These themes challenge us to think and speak differently about the aspirations for land conservation, and also offer the promise of a much greater impact to our culture. It is an appeal to all of us to consider the health and well being of our place in the world in terms of the quality of the relationships between the land and the people who are there. This is not nostalgic. We must go forward to nature, not back to it. The future of our culture hinges on our ability to understand and explain this statement.

September 11th required that we listen and be aware, and it is helping us today to develop the humility, sense of fairness, and wider view of the world necessary to create the magnitude of change that we aspire to. This is a time for reflection and absolute boldness. It's a time to experiment without sacrificing any discipline. It's a time when we must allow what we care about most to guide everything we do. To be wild, they say, is to be bold, untamed, and free. This is a time for us to practice our wildness.

So let us now begin the exciting work of creating and telling a new story: the yearning for a better life - a new American dream - that lies within the human heart and soul. Our concern for the Earth is the same as our concern for own heart and soul. This is why land conservation must search to see the results of its labor in both nature and culture. Our moral response to the events of the day is to rethink the promise of land conservation as the defense of our human relationship with the world of life. This aspiration for land conservation will be not reached alone by how much nature we can put aside, but by how much love and respect for the land we can engender in the greatest number of people. Our greatest achievement is not being able to say "we saved this place," but being able to say, instead, "you belong here. you are home" Land conservation can become the story of how the soul of the land became the soul of our culture, signaling over and over our place in the world.