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"Preface," by Don Henley, to Heaven
Is Under Our Feet
This document is reprinted, with several changes
by Don Henley on 6 June 2000, and with the permission of Don Henley and The
Walden Woods Project, from Heaven
Is Under Our Feet, edited by Don Henley and Dave Marsh (Stamford,
Conn.: Longmeadow Press, 1991), pp. 9–18.
I
grew up outside. Outdoors and outside. I liked my home and my little town,
but, in the company of other humans, I often felt like an alien—as if I
had been dropped there in that place by space travelers that I couldn’t
remember. It wasn’t a bad place, really. It was quite beautiful in the
spring and fall, but pretty bleak in winter because it rarely snowed,
which left the frozen earth in a dreary state of gray-brown nakedness. I
have learned, over the years, that this flies in the face of the general
climatic impression of Texas that most people carry. Many seem to think of
the Lone Star State as a
perpetually blazing desert with
cowpokes, armadillos, and cactus all around. That is true for a healthy
portion of the state, but it’s a big place and the climate, flora, and
fauna vary wildly. Just as surely as a July sunburn will take all the skin
off the unwary bather, livestock are commonly found standing up, frozen
solid, in February. Cowsicles, we used to call them. Still, I found
comfort and wonder outdoors in all seasons. In spring I would don my
raincoat and go walking in thundershowers. This little custom scared the
living daylights out of my mother, who was certain I would be struck by
lightning or swept away by the malignant elements. We lived in tornado
country and my grandmother, guided by some ancient wisdom, had spent a
lifetime herding her family into the storm cellar every time a dark cloud
appeared in the sky. But I loved weather. Still do. Storms heighten the
senses. You know you’re alive.
In summer I roamed the woods with my dog. There were streams and
ponds, tadpoles and frogs and chameleons to catch—typical Mark Twain,
Norman Rockwell, boyhood stuff. There was not much else to do.
Fortunately, the advent of the video arcade was still over two decades
away, though there was the occasional pinball game. The local “picture
show” had gone the way of most small town cinemas, but the roller rink
endured and, only a quarter of a mile from our house, the county rodeo
grounds were bathed in a dusty, acrid halo every summer weekend. One
steamy Saturday night, an escaped Brahman bull came tearing through my
father’s cornfield with three ropers in hot pursuit. The terrified
animal somehow ended up on our front porch with his nose pressed up
against the screen door, panting and snorting. In my young mind, it was as
if he were asking us to let him in—to give him sanctuary from his
tormentors. My parents, of course, didn’t see it quite that way. The
cowboys finally got a rope or two on him and dragged him back to his pen.
Next morning, my dad cursed over his trampled corn. I felt sorry for the
bull.
When I got a little older and learned how to use a rod and reel,
Dad began to take me on fishing trips to Caddo Lake, a large, elongated
body of water that lies half in Texas and half in Louisiana. Named for the
Caddo Indians, it is one of those atmospheric, Southern places populated
by bald cypress trees dripping with Spanish moss. It is also home to a
good many alligators, pelicans, egrets, herons, catfish, snapping turtles,
perch, and bass. According to local lore, this rich ecosystem was created
by a major geological upheaval some two hundred years ago. This was my
Walden. I caught my first fish there.
Along with his love of lake fishing, my father was an avid
gardener—a result of his Depression-era upbringing on a farm. He was
meticulous and exacting about it, and on many a summer morning he rousted
me out of bed well before sunup and handed me a hoe. We had over an acre
to tend and the objective was to get as much as possible done before the
sun got too high in the sky and the temperature rose above one hundred.
The humidity in that region, while good for the skin and for growing
vegetables, is oppressive, and heat exhaustion is always a possibility in
summer. On several occasions, my thoughts turned patricidal. It was bad
enough getting up at such an ungodly hour, but to have to work all day in
the sweltering heat and roiling dust was too much, especially, as I
imagined, when everybody else was off somewhere having a great time. When
he detected signs of rebellion, my dad would remind me that, although I
might not like the toil involved in growing the vegetables, I certainly
did like to eat them. I found this line of reasoning difficult to argue
with, but it usually didn’t improve my mood. Still, once in a while on a
Saturday, the old man would lighten up and grant me clemency for the
afternoon while he finished up the work by himself. There was a certain
amount of guilt that went with me, which, I’m sure, was his intent. But,
as the years have passed, I have grown to appreciate, more and more, what
he taught me, not only about growing things in the earth, but also about
responsibility and the value of hard, physical work. I now derive physical
and spiritual pleasure from gardening and there is tremendous satisfaction
in knowing that I could survive almost anywhere if I had to. All this
galls me a little because he always said it would turn out this way.
I began to read when I was five. My dad sometimes read the “funny
papers” to me on Sundays and my mother, a college graduate and former
schoolteacher, read to me almost every day from books. As I grew, she made
sure that there was always reading material in the house that was suited
to my age and ability. The Great Depression had halted my father’s
schooling at the eighth grade, but he had a native intelligence, was very
good at math and quite competent at reading and spelling. He and my mother
were determined that I would go to college. It wasn’t even a question in
our home—it was just understood. They didn’t necessarily care what I
became, so long as I went—a
good, college education—that was the thing. To that end, my father saved
from the day I was born, bought savings bonds, and by the time I graduated
from high school, there was enough (in 1965 dollars) for my college
tuition.
I honestly don’t remember when
I was first introduced to the works of Henry David Thoreau or by whom.
It may have been my venerable high school English teacher, Margaret
Lovelace, or it may have been one of my university professors. I was lucky
enough to have a few exceptional ones and that is sometimes all a kid
needs—just one or two really good teachers can make all the difference
in the world. It can inspire and change a life (but alas, all the money
and attention nowadays is going to athletes, actors, musicians,
C.E.O.’s, doctors, lawyers and the military industrial complex, while
teachers languish in relative obscurity).
Thoreau’s writing struck me like a thunderbolt. Like all great
literature, it articulated something that I knew intuitively, but could
not quite bring into focus for myself. I loved Emerson, too, and his
essay, “Self-Reliance,” was instrumental in giving me the courage to
become a songwriter. The works of both men were a catalyst for a sort of
epiphany in which I rediscovered my hometown and the beauty of the
surrounding landscape, and, through that, some evidence of divinity or
God, if you like. This spiritual awakening brought great comfort and
relief because the Southern
Baptist Church just wasn’t working for me.
I have volunteered all this because, as Thoreau declared in the
beginning of Walden, “I should not talk so much about myself if there were
anybody else whom 1 knew as well . . . Moreover, 1, on my side, require of
every writer, first or last, a simple and sincere account of his own life,
and not merely what he has heard of other men’s lives . . .” Also,
there has been a great deal of curiosity, speculation and, in some
quarters, skepticism bordering on cynicism, as to how and why I came to be
involved in the movement to preserve the stomping grounds of Henry David
Thoreau and his friend and mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson. What, in other
words, is California rock & roll trash doing meddling around in
something as seemingly esoteric and high-minded as literature, philosophy
and history—the American Transcendentalist Movement and all its ascetic
practitioners. Seems perfectly natural to me. American Literature, like
the air we breathe, belongs—or should belong—to everybody. I’m an
“Everyman” kind of guy. I studied the big “E” in college and
subsequently, with a little hard work and some stroke of fortune, have bad
a respectable degree of success communicating with him for the past thirty
years. In short, there is a job that needs doing; needs some “plain
speaking,” and I think I can
help—even from here in Gomorrah-by-the-Sea. Indeed, living and working
in Los Angeles has taught me a great deal about the stormy confluence of
art and commerce—about how the “real world” operates. And, though I
often disagree with some of the principles (or lack thereof) involved, the
preservation of historic Walden Woods is going to require a healthy dose
of “operating” in the real world. The great halls of learning may keep
Thoreau’s literature and principles alive, but they will be of little
help in fortifying the well whence they sprang.
At the outset of this effort, an American writer whom I have long
admired and who, like Thoreau, is something of an iconoclast and
independent thinker, stated in a rather surly letter that he would not
participate in this book because he doesn’t believe in shrines.
He has sadly (and surprisingly) missed the point.
Walden Woods is not meant to be a shrine to Henry David Thoreau
nor, I think, would he have wanted it to be one.
In Thoreau’s time, although Walden was not heavily inhabited, it
was home to a number of ne’er-do-wells, transients, freed slaves, and
shanty Irish. Thoreau, a Harvard graduate, apparently had no qualms about
sharing the woods with such company. The townspeople, however, looked upon
Walden Woods as a dark and forbidding place. Over the years, the woods
have been ravaged by fire (Thoreau accidentally burned down about a
hundred acres in April of 1844), uncontrolled woodcutting, and political
neglect. Unfortunately, the focus of preservation efforts has come to rest
on the pond and its immediate surroundings. That is all well and good,
except that there remain approximately two thousand six hundred acres that
are inside the historic boundaries of Walden Woods and deserve protection
as well. Thoreau did not live in Walden Pond, he lived beside it. The man
did not walk on water, he walked several miles a day through the woods and
his musings and writings therein figure at least as prominently in his
literature as Walden Pond does. In other words, the width and breadth of
his inspiration, the scope of his legacy is not limited to one sixty
two-acre pond and it is absurd to think so. Walden Woods is not a
pristine, grand tract of wilderness, but it is still, for the most part,
exceedingly beautiful and inspiring. It is, for all intents and purposes,
the cradle of the American environmental movement and should be preserved
for its intrinsic, symbolic value or, as Ed Schofield, noted Thoreau
scholar, so succinctly put it, “When Walden goes, all the issues
radiating out from Walden go, too. If the prime place can be disposed of,
how much easier to dispose of the issues it represents.”
People seem to be very attached to their symbols although they can
sometimes not articulate why (witness the recent brouhaha over flag
burning). In the United States, we revere the flag, the Cross, the Star of
David, the Mississippi River, the Grand Canyon. These things tell us who
we are as a people; they tell us where we stand in the world, in the
universe, and, more importantly, they show us that there is ultimately
something larger and more important than ourselves. Being the proud nation
that we are, that’s a hard one for us to swallow. Symbols, therefore,
get perverted and their meanings twisted because we fail to see the
connectedness of things. We, the thinking, reasoning animal—the
“highest” form of life on the planet—tend to view ourselves as
outside of, or above the natural
order. Historically, we have often been diametrically opposed to it. The
formidable Wallace Stegner, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist, historian,
and biographer, in his book The
American West as Living Space, reminds us:
Behind the pragmatic, manifest-destinarian purpose of
pushing western settlement was another motive: the hard determination to
dominate nature that historian Lynn White, in the essay “Historical
Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis,” identified as part of our Judeo-Christian
heritage. Nobody implemented that impulse more uncomplicatedly than the
Mormons, a chosen people who believed the Lord when He told them to make
the desert bloom as the rose. Nobody expressed it more bluntly than a
Mormon hierarch, John Widtsoe, in the middle of the irrigation campaigns:
“The destiny of man is to possess the whole earth; the destiny of the
earth is to be subject to man. There can be no full conquest of the earth,
and no real satisfaction to humanity, if large portions of the earth
remain beyond his highest control.
Our very virtues as a pioneering people, the very genius of our
industrial civilization, drove us to act as we did. God and Manifest
Destiny spoke with one voice urging us to “conquer” or “win” the
West; and there was no voice of comparable authority to remind us of Mary
Austin’s quiet but profound truth, that the manner of the country makes
the usage of life there, and that the land will not be lived in except in
its own fashion.”
I have always had some difficulty with the Christian concepts of
Armageddon and The Rapture because the supposed inevitability of these
events absolves believers of any long-term responsibility regarding the
future of life on this plane. Since this world is temporal, there is an
inherent hopelessness for what God has created here; for what humankind in
particular is capable of. When I look around the battered landscape, I
sometimes almost accede and yet I cannot see the difference between this
kind of apocalyptic vision and nihilism. Exactly where does the
responsibility lie? It seems to me that this, at least for the time being,
is a pretty nice place to live. It nurtures us both physically and
spiritually. It provides us with the very foundation of our existence. It
seems to me that believers and nonbelievers alike have an obligation as
tenants here to act responsibly toward the Landlord; that if one insults
the Creation, one insults the Creator. Unfortunately, most of us tend to
think only in terms of our own lifetime, or, if we have offspring, one or
two generations beyond. It seems to me that we should proceed in good
faith, with our best efforts, as if life here were a possibility until the
sun dies.
And God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness:
and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of
the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every
creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.” (Genesis 1:26, King James
Bible.)
If
the Lord did, in fact, utter these words sans any kind of cautionary
caveat, then they must have lost something in the translation because we
have just about “dominioned” ourselves to death.
God, the Divinity, the Over-Soul, (or whatever term you wish to
use) is manifest nowhere as surely and as magnificently as in untrammeled
nature, and I think that a great deal of the spiritual groping and
confusion now inherent in our society stems from the fact that we have
strayed so far from our roots which are in the land. One hundred years
ago, approximately 95 percent of the people in this country lived on farms
or in rural areas. Now it is exactly the opposite. An overwhelming
majority of the population now lives in urban areas (in fact, between two
and three million acres of farmland are gobbled up each year by urban
sprawl and we have hacked down all but five percent of our forests). We
have distanced ourselves from contact that we once had on a regular basis
with the natural cycle of birth, death, decay and rebirth. To be sure,
there is birth, death and decay in the city. There is even rebirth, but it
does not spring naturally from the decay. A new building, for instance,
does not spring up nourished by the rotting carcass of the old one that it
has replaced. The debris of demolished edifices is generally hauled away
and dumped somewhere upon the landscape or into the sea.
I’m not saying that everybody should pack up and move back to the
country. The country couldn’t take the onslaught. What I am saying is
that we should make an effort to rekindle respect for the values that come
from life lived in harmony with the land. Though it seems almost like a
cliche now, we would do well to take a lesson from the Native American as
he existed before the coming of the frontier, before we beat him into
submission and packed him off to the arid wastelands—out of sight and
out of mind.
What we lack is humility, and underlying that is a dearth of
self-esteem. From the endless stream of macabre, self-congratulation on
conquests of one kind or another, to the heedless destruction of our
ancient redwoods (the oldest living things on the planet), to the building
of more powerful weapons of war, to the fevered paving over of precious
farmland, the construction of impersonal malls and ever-higher
skyscrapers, and the slaughter of defenseless animals for the manufacture
of vanity items such as make-up and fur coats, it appears that we, as a
people, must go to greater and greater lengths to feel good about
ourselves. “What we call man’s power over nature turns out to be a
power exercised by some men over other men with nature as its
instrument.” (C.S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, p. 35.)
President Calvin Coolidge once said that the business of America is
business. This, I fear, will finally be our undoing unless we change our
current direction and thought. In the ongoing battle between commerce and
the natural environment, nature is almost invariably the loser.
Habits persist. The hard, aggressive, single-minded
energy that according to politicians made America great is demonstrated
every day in resource raids and leveraged takeovers by entrepreneurs; and
along with that competitive individualism and ruthlessness goes a
rejection of any controlling past or tradition. What matters is here, now,
the seizable opportunity. “We don’t need any history,” said one
Silicon Valley executive when the Santa Clara County Historical Society
tried to bring the electronics industry together with the few remaining
farmers to discuss what was happening to the valley that only a decade or
two ago was the fruit bowl of the world. “What we need is more attention
to our computers and the moves of the competition.”
A high degree of mobility, a degree of ruthlessness, a large
component of both self-sufficiency and self-righteousness mark the
historical pioneer, the lone-riding folk hero, and the modern businessman
intent on opening new industrial frontiers and getting his own in the
process. (Wallace Stegner, The
American West as Living Space, pp. 75, 76.)
Stegner goes on to lament the disappearance of the true culture
hero—“the individual who transcends his culture without abandoning it,
who leaves for a while in search of opportunity but never forgets where he
left his heart.”
Yet another problem, and perhaps the most insidious of all is denial.
One hears that word quite often of late. In my vicinity, it is
generally used in connection with alcoholism and drug abuse and the myriad
programs designed for the cure of these maladies. However, it is now more
than appropriate to describe the state of American, or in most cases,
global consciousness concerning the crisis facing the ecosystem. Where the
environment is concerned, according to reams of scientific data (any sane
person can see it with his own eyes), there is definitely an elephant in
the room. Unfortunately, there are still an alarming number of people,
including a great many officials in our federal government, who insist
there isn’t. “Further studies . . .” is the popular talismanic
phrase.
A sign of the times: both left and right, with equal vehemence,
repudiate the charge of ‘pessimism.’ Neither side has any use for
“doomsayers.” Neither
wants to admit that our society has taken a wrong turn, lost its way, and
needs to recover a sense of purpose and direction. Neither addresses the
overriding issue of limits, so threatening to those who wish to appear
optimistic at all times. The fact remains: the earth’s finite resources
will not support an indefinite expansion of industrial civilization. The
right proposes, in effect, to maintain our riotous standard of living, as
it has been maintained in the past, at the expense of the rest of the
world (increasingly at the expense of our own minorities as well). This
program is self-defeating, not only because it will produce environmental
effects from which even the rich cannot escape but because it will widen
the gap between rich and poor nations, generate more and more violent
movements of insurrection and terrorism against the West, and bring about
a deterioration of the world’s political climate as threatening as the
deterioration of its physical climate.
But the historical program of the left has become equally
self-defeating. The attempt to extend Western standards of living to the
rest of the world will lead even more quickly to the exhaustion of
nonrenewable resources, the irreversible pollution of the earth’s
atmosphere, and the destruction of the ecological system on which human
life depends. “Let us imagine,” writes Rudolf Bahro, a leading
spokesman for the West German Greens, “what it would mean if the raw
material and energy consumption of our society were extended to the 6
billion people living today, or to the ten to fifteen billion there will
probably be tomorrow. It is readily apparent that the planet can only
support such volumes of production . . . for a short time to come.”
These considerations refute conventional optimism (though the real
despair lies in a refusal to confront them at all), and both the right and
left therefore prefer to talk about something else—for example, to
exchange accusations of fascism and socialism. But the ritual deployment
and rhetorical inflation of these familiar slogans provide further
evidence of the emptiness of recent political debate. (Christopher Lasch, The
True Read Only Heaven, pp. 23, 24.)
Don Henley, founder
and co-chairman of the Walden Woods Project, was born and raised in Texas.
He attended public school in his hometown of Linden, and furthered his
education with two years at Stephen F. Austin University and two years at
the University of North Texas. He moved to California in 1970. He is a
recording artist, songwriter and record producer. He currently resides
with his family in Dallas.
Copyright © 2006 by The Walden Woods Project
All Rights Reserved
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