Act NOW to save the art and beauty of our collective Crown Jewels
Do you want old-growth forests or charcoal and paper pulp that could be created another way?
vol. 6 issue 15
Greetings,
While there is a carnival around us, having set up its camp in Washington, with its barkers posted at media outlets nationally, I have been making my way through a documentary about Crow Nation artist and “spirit walker”, the late Earl Biss. It’s not long, but my schedule is full, so I fit in bits of it around other calendar items. The film is a respite from the carny contortions hyping for our attention.
Biss’s work tells us that all the things we pay attention to, all the things we build — they might be nice, they might be entertaining, they might even be meaningful, but they are not the real world. The real world, he says to the camera, is the mountains, the trees, the water — the sum total of nature.
In a moment, I will share something important regarding our nation’s old-growth forests that you might want to put your attention toward — but you have only until tomorrow, Friday, September 30th…read on...
Biss was a genius with color, painting deep, rich abstracts at the start of his career to bide time, he said, until he had arrived at how he could render his people and his ancestral lands (in the place we call Montana) without dishonoring them. He spoke of “painting literally”, often depicting the stories passed on to him through the oral traditions of his people. It was about a decade before he thought he was ready to paint them.
My takeaway from this documentary so far is that Biss was harmed by having to fit the ecstatic immediacy with which he experienced the world, into the template of linearity that enforces itself through policies aimed at disconnection and separation to support not joy but markets.
That is to say, our “systems” are what kill us by robbing from us, and they probably helped kill Biss — he drank heavily and died of a stroke at age 51 — having as he did, fought a lifetime of constant frustration with the devaluing of the land around him. Indeed, the below painting by him is called “Perspective”, which I take to mean: this is what matters.
Through his abstractions and forms, I detected he was arguing with the straight, up, and down limitations imposed on us all, including the land. Limitations imposed for the purpose of a few having the power to amass essential resources so that only they have easy access to them. I think his argument was, Why?
And I think he knew the answer: Because where we put our attention is where our power and life energy flows. The more we give our attention to where others call it, the less powerful we are. One day, we wake up to our powerlessness and respond either with apathy or violence. Or, as I suspect in Biss’s case, sorrowful drinking until early death.
Beauty is one of the resources that has been slowly stolen from us, I have tended to believe. But while watching this documentary, another documentary was sent to me: Crown Jewels. It’s an hour-long exploration of what has already happened and what is projected to happen on a much larger scale if the US Forest Service’s currently described old-growth forests management plan goes into effect as written: namely, it will give the green light to commercial logging by clear-cutting several old-growth forests across the nation in order to — wait for it — sell them for charcoal and paper pulp.
This is conscientious “management” the Forest Service says, and it lays out its reasoning online, which I urge anyone interested in the beauty of the forest, and the silent, protective mystery of 200-foot and higher trees, to read and then comment on, which I will say more about shortly.
Crown Jewels, with its focus on how the trees contribute to communities and ecosystems, now has me contemplating beauty not only as a resource but a value system. I am now synthesizing beauty as a resource at the core of a value system that must be vanquished if the market value system is to triumph.
I was so appalled at the scenes of destruction, I found myself watching the film in one sitting, as though I was stopped in traffic behind a horrible car wreck, compelled to witness it.
What struck me was what every community facing the imminent destruction of their landscape — not by invading enemies but by their own federal government — listed first as their fear: the loss of the beauty that has defined their lives and their ancestry.
Put bluntly: they are stunned that the government proposes to use their tax-paid money to destroy what provides value and gives meaning to their lives.
Then the film went on to demonstrate with science how the destruction would ultimately ruin the communities through landslides and silted streams.
The people who live with the trees value beauty and community. They see the trees as integral to those values. And as I watched, horrified for them, I wanted to know, what on Earth makes the economic valuing of something more important, and in the ascendant over any other value system, especially one based on beauty?
Certainly, the value system of beauty is the one actually sustainable by comparison. The bogus notion that markets will ever actually allow beauty to have equal value to money is laughable, and thus why I always roll my eyes when some corporate “social responsibility” officer drones on about how they value [insert here] when even they know it’s not true.
ACT NOW:
The government values money, and has grown so fat with its own systemized importance, we are lucky to still have a comment period to speak truth to their bloated power. If you’d like to speak up, you can go here, and learn about what you can say to the Forest Service to, hopefully, give them pause. You can also include these suggested comments with your own thoughts, as I did with mine, to strengthen your case. The sum of my comment: money as a value system should not take precedence over other value systems, and there are other solutions than the ones they propose — and they know it.
This is one of the most encompassing nature-related policies ever implemented, and it could destroy forever one of our primary sources of beauty — trees well over 200 years old. Also, these trees are an important factor in regulating temperatures, filtering drinking water, and protecting wildlife, among many other gifts they give.
Two hundred years is a long time to wait to bring them back, and in fact, that is not part of the plan. Instead, different species of trees, ones that grow faster, but thinner, and which will be cut again, are planted in their place, if planting is done at all.
The hammer drops TOMORROW, Friday, September 20. But by commenting here, you truly have the power to make a difference, because there has truly been a population-level movement to stop this bizarre disregard for life.
The government is nothing if not good at creating forms, and this form is one of the best. So clear and easy to fill out. Best of all, it’s part of what is left of our democratic processes: by law, the Forest Service must read every comment.
I would have said that the two value systems — beauty and money — are mutually exclusive, but that is not entirely true. I think it comes down to who is implementing the system that determines whether the two can be merged successfully.
For example, the film also spends time with the Menomonie, a people indigenous to Northeastern Wisconsin. The Menomonie also log commercially, but do it in a respectful, sustaining way. They even harvest trees that are over 200 years old, but they respect these trees, and so their logging is done — how shall I say it — prayerfully? It is done with reverence. The result is an industry-wide acknowledgment that theirs is the best timber on the market.
They have combined the two value systems to sustain future generations and a way of life predicated on the land owning them, not the other way around.
What galls me is to think of such systems as the Forest Service’s one of ruin being evermore foisted on us, which is why I cherish the democratically informed process of being able to comment on this wantonly destructive policy in its current form. I hope you will join me, but only after you have apprised yourself of the facts from other sources such as here and here, and of course here.
Meanwhile, the fact is that the Menomonie already have demonstrated that there is a better way to commercially log. The feds, I believe, would rather we just leave them alone in their inertia, however. I don’t blame the individuals in the Forest Service per se, but I do question why their plans can’t take the sustaining power of beauty into account. But I know the answer — because beauty is irrelevant to economic policies that support investors from overseas or on Wall Street. Those investors don’t live with the aftermath of the clear-cutting and extraction, but they do pay for our government to focus on what benefits them.
More on Biss, beauty, and values…
In Biss’s work, I can sense the wind in the trees, and the sting of winter. His work, “Early Snow on the Beartooth Ridge”, I think stands out, but I wasn’t able to find a big enough image of it to do it justice:
“Beartooth Range”, below, reminds me of the late French Impressionists, Monet meets Seurat:
Biss’s work is reminiscent of previous schools of oil painting with good reason: he valued the Old Dutch Masters, the French Impressionists, and other schools, spending time in Amsterdam, Paris, and elsewhere in Europe, learning by copying. He dropped out of the San Francisco School of Art to do so.
That caught my attention because he valued what the European aesthetic could teach him, even though the Europeans also were the ones who brought systematic separation of us all from nature, as required by the ethos of the colonial system, and so justified stealing the land from Biss’s and others’ ancestors, often killing for it.
I thought about this for a while as I fell asleep last night, trying to distill it.
It occurred to me that what Biss wanted from the Continental artists was simply access to their statements of beauty so he could learn to communicate the beauty he saw. When beauty is the subject of conversation, divisions dissolve.
He did not see himself as separate from these Europeans just because he was Indian, and he didn’t want others to do that to him — he discusses this fear in the film. He valued the voices of the masters and wished to be valued, too. Visions of the beauty in life were the equalizer.
If, like Biss, we turn our attention to the real world, the one where beauty lives, we likely find ourselves facing a similar predicament to his: how do we communicate our own connection to that actual, real world?
I think it’s by knowing what we value. And then, to act on those values.
This is a summary from the heartbreakingly beautiful, but also laugh-out-loud funny memoir, Desert Solitaire, by Edward Abbey, first published in 1968 (pp. 106-107 in the 1990 Touchstone paperback edition): The Navajo have a reputation for being bad with money and unwilling to be employed, which is outrageously stupid, because why would the Navajo care about money when it wasn’t part of their value system? They lack an “acquisitive instinct”, Abbey wrote.
Still speaking of the Navajo, he also wrote:
“He lacks the drive to get ahead of his fellows or to figure out ways and means of profiting from other people’s labor…the Navajo thinks it somehow immoral for one man to prosper while his neighbors go without.”
Since then, for the sake of living now and for the future, indigenous peoples such as the Navajo with livestock and agriculture as well as some extraction, and Menomonie with their logging, have demonstrated how to combine the colonial, extractive market value system with theirs of beauty and creation.
As for the rest of us, that part where I said we are surrounded by a carnival? I believe it was pitched so we will focus on whatever nonsense we’re told is important. When we’re distracted this way, it’s easier to take away or at least monopolize things of value, like natural “resources”. Or, worse, to tell us what the value of all things is, and make us act accordingly.
That, beyond the art, is what intrigued me about Biss. Beauty was his value, not money, even though in his lifetime, he was quite “successful” by market standards. I don’t need to finish watching to know his legacy is literally, beauty.
What will be our legacy? A ruined land, the result of imposed values, I reckon, unless we take action, which we still have the means to do — at least for now.
Peace,
Whitney