Man, the Master?
Borland, Hal
Man, the Master? HAL BORLAND Snow yesterday. Not much, but snow just the same. This morning it is raining, cold rain from a deep gray sky, which probably is the way it should be. No more Indian...
...I am both wiser and more adaptable than a cricket or a katydid...
...I can continue to live here in relative comfort and safety only as long as I continue to make those compromises...
...I stood there and watched where the grouse had flown...
...We did have splendid tomatoes, but late...
...We had a chilly summer, both chilly and sizzling...
...Growing a part of our own food is just a part of our way of life, our cooperation with this environment...
...Or am I, after all...
...Nature, in his cosmos, is the enemy...
...Man is not a god...
...Superior Strategy If we want to compete successfully with communism or any other ideology, we must recognize that economic and social revolutions cannot be deterred or contained by military power...
...How can you tell such a man that life is more than his own egocentric self...
...A different year, at least, in ways that have done little to bolster the idea that Man, the Master of His Environment, is on the right track...
...An early snow would have fitted the year's strange pattern, and perhaps it would have cleansed and clarified the world...
...Our Army Engineers build dams that hold water just long enough to create disaster when they rupture...
...relieves it of any responsibility to report to Congress, and generally does away with the traditional democratic safeguard that demands a public accounting from agencies financed by public funds...
...Then we had a rainy spring and a tremendous burst of growth, green growth, as though somebody had given the order to gat this old earth properly clothed as soon as possible for some special event...
...We hear talk about protecting this element of the environment or that element, and too much of the talk is as arrogant as the destruction itself...
...Maybe it will turn to snow by night...
...Then we had light frost that skipped about, as usual, darkening a few squash leaves but not touching the tomatoes...
...John Swomley Jr...
...A crew with chain saws must cut down a forest because someone wants more pulp for paper, more plywood to build doghouses and seashore shanties...
...It belongs to the whole of life, and if man too long or too completely abuses that environment he will be eliminated from it or, at the very least, reduced to a minor element in the whole spectrum of life____ The nights have become quiet again...
...CopyrightIV76 by Hal Borland...
...A crew with bulldozers must move a mountain because someone wants to get at a seam of coal or a lode of ore, or someone wants a valley filled so a factory or a supermarket can be built there...
...It was late September before we had tomatoes to can...
...But after this year's weather, what can you expect...
...That part planted late just pestered along, as they say, and finally the insects got more of it than we did...
...And today it is raining, the cold, gray rain we sometimes get this time of year...
...We see this every day, hear about it every hour...
...to strengthen life, not weaken it...
...Justice William O. Douglas April 1952...
...He cannot create new rhythms in nature...
...I have been reading about Homo habilis, an early form of man who lived in Africa...
...THE WAY WE SAW IT These excerpts from articles and editorials published during The Progressive's sixty-seven year history have been edited only to achieve brevity...
...It is the end of a somewhat erratic autumn of an erratic year...
...For how long, I do not know...
...Man can conserve what he has, he can control his own actions, but the environment does not belong to him...
...Nonsense...
...This was a lush pasture year and a good corn year, more than enough to fill the silos and the bunkers...
...Man does run his fields, chooses his crops, kills or cares for whatever he wishes on his own acres...
...It is the life force, the total which is nature itself...
...But if there is a man who might have a gun they go all-out and usually startle him enough to gain an extra half-second escape time...
...Our energy experts debate the merits of coal, oil, and atoms while wind and water blow and flow without turning enough generators to light one crossroad village...
...As I approached this tangle two ruffed grouse took off with a roar like a racing car...
...Not the Bicentennial...
...We said we prefer our own...
...Green for summer, for fruition, for ripeness, for the green of next year and years to come, each year special...
...A Cabinet officer who should have been fired months ago is forced to resign because he tells a dirty story...
...City friends, on a trip to see the color, stopped in and asked why we were going to all that trouble, canning tomatoes, when we could buy them already canned for a mere pittance at the store...
...Richard Hofstadter December 1949 The CIA's Immunity The CIA's immunity from public scrutiny is complete...
...I looked around and found two fist-size stones, struck one against the other and flaked off a sharp-edged shard with which I slit the rabbit's skin, stripped it off, then slit the belly and gutted it...
...A crew of dam-builders must dam a river because a city wants more electricity to run electric toothbrushes and can-openers, more water to wash automobiles...
...It must be dammed, paved over, timbered off, bulldozed, smothered, and overwhelmed by man's machines and his poison sprays...
...But what we are dealing with really is not at man's command...
...Not long ago I said in public print that nature's purpose, as far as we understand purpose at all, is to perpetuate life, not destroy it...
...but the insects were old even in the time of Homo habilis...
...It sometimes seems that man isn't on the track at ail...
...That part of our garden planted early throve...
...I followed the brook, which was chattering from one small fall to another, and I was soon at the edge of the upper meadow, a small clearing now overgrown with wild raspberry bushes...
...That is the essential, the respect that comes from understanding and leads to a sense of proportion and a proper sense of humility...
...We said yes, we counted it up one year just out of curiosity...
...I saw them for one long flash before they whirred around a big pine and were gone...
...Here in my valley, where cows are the producers and milk is the vendable commodity, we grow pasturage and corn for silage...
...I was in Africa...
...He even blames floods and famines, as well as plagues, on nature...
...And sat there on that hillside thinking that I had made peace with my environment...
...The spits of snow became motes in the blazing sunlight...
...It would be a strange irony if the gas in a can of shaving cream for a beardless weather forecaster should be the final nudge needed to drop the temperature enough to start the big glaciers moving...
...There was an early hay crop, first cutting the last week in May...
...Public Law 283 of the Eightieth Congress, which created the agency as the intelligence arm of the National Security Council, exempts the CIA from the standard requirements of disclosing the names of employes, or the number employed, or the nature of its functions...
...Our master rocketeers spend a billion dollars sending a machine to Mars to look under a rock for a little green man who isn't there...
...Surrounded by institutions he evolved and structures he built, he too often believes he can ignore or repeal the most enduring fundamental of all — cause and effect...
...Perhaps...
...Meanwhile, such everyday factors as SSTs and an assortment of rockets have been at work, ripping the thin atmospheric skin of the earth to tatters...
...I live here only because I have made my compromises with life and the environment...
...Yesterday was a raw day with spits of snow in the air...
...It had a good start...
...We know what fertilizer and what pesticides go into our vegetables...
...All the teeming world around him, plant life and animal life, is beyond the boundaries he recognizes...
...If I had not known so many other autumns I would wonder if my form of life was being isolated and phased out, for the good of the environment But I am wise and experienced...
...Our weakness grows when we become intolerant of opposing ideas, depart from our standards of civil liberties, and borrow the policeman's philosophy from the enemy we detest...
...We were still canning them the first week in October, when the maples were turning color...
...It assumes that man is the sole judge of what should be saved, that by saving that essential part he can control nature...
...My kind, Man, the Master of His Environment, who seems to be going full-tilt but doesn't know which is the right track____ I came back down the path beside the brook, back across the home pasture, to the red farmhouse and its outbuildings...
...And he went on to say, "If man did not protect himself against nature he would soon be wiped out...
...I am sure he believes that only the Corps of Engineers stands between him and a repetition of Noah's flood, and that DDT is the only answer to disease and starvation in every overpopulated country...
...Soon afterward I received a letter from a reader who Hal Borland, the distinguished nature write/and conservationist, lives in the foothills of the Berkshires in western Connecticut...
...In terms of life, they are a success...
...Man is a part of that life principle, but his tendency is to dominate...
...I built a fire, cooked my rabbit, and ate...
...Will a Twenty-first Century cave man comb his long beard with his fingers and wonder what happened to everybody...
...Those birds can take off as quietly as an owl, if they choose to...
...Now I am here, I and all my own kind...
...Whether this year's freakish weather portends a new Ice Age or a Big Melt is a question the weather scientists seem reluctant to answer...
...We have been tinkering with weather-control, and so have the Russians, though nobody has said much about it...
...As I was saying a few paragraphs back, it has been a freakish year of weather...
...They asked if we ever counted up the cost of growing a garden, seed, labor, price of the land, all that...
...Sunspot cycles are well known, though they are not yet completely understood...
...Anyway, the green appeared and clothed the earth...
...If we are true to our traditions, if we are tolerant of the whole marketplace of ideas, we will always be strong...
...Peace enough...
...We had June in March, and the fruit trees, even the wild berry bushes, came to blossom, only to be frosted back soon after...
...So, this being the kind of day it is, let's throw another log on the fire and think about who we are and where we are...
...But he can't dictate to rain, or to hail, or to sunshine, or to frost The wise farmer admits this, grudgingly...
...One farmer used the cut of an abandoned railroad line through his farm for a silage bunker, no doubt remembering the old sayings, "Save and use...
...Robert Repas September 1953 'Our Real Power' Our real power is our spiritual strength, and that spiritual strength stems from our civil liberties...
...said, "Please explain the purpose of nature's floods, famines, plagues, earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc...
...Corn grew like the proverbial weeds, which now are sprayed into oblivion...
...We grow it to eat better food...
...Perhaps it is too soon to know about man...
...And as I sat there the spits of snow were in the air again, and below me was a farmhouse in the Housatonic valley, a man-tamed, cultivated, man-dominated valley, the place where I live...
...Homo habilis lived in Africa maybe three million years ago, but he and all his tribe vanished, the way I read the story...
...He plants his seed and hopes for the best...
...As he has evolved complexities of living, which he calls civilization, he has repeatedly lost perspective of himself and his cosmos...
...We obviously live in different worlds, this man and I. To him, life means mankind, nothing else...
...And he tends to minimize the importance of life itself — not only human life, which has been appallingly cheapened, but the great stream of life, the whole life principle of this earth...
...Nobody else seems to know, either...
...It didn't though...
...He cannot long disrupt the old rhythms and get away with it...
...Domination leads to belief in omniscience and omnipotence, so he sees himself apart, almost beyond natural law...
...And I added that we don't grow a garden to save money...
...One of the most disturbing elements of life today is man's tendency to drift or stray not only from the land but from the basic elements of his environment, the fundamental rhythms of life...
...Unless an author's name is appended, the material appeared as editorial comment...
...Not if you agree with me about nature's purposes...
...I live on, a sentient man in a shelter that protects me from the killing cold...
...Others came, and still others...
...It is of no consequence that a mountain is an entity, with its own place in the pattern of the land, or that a tree is a living thing that grows slowly, year by year, or that a river is not only water but fish and fowl and a whole spectrum of life that will be destroyed when the river is dammed or diverted...
...What we should be saying, and believing, is that we will respect life...
...I was Homo habilis, in a breechclout and with a tanned hyena skin over my shoulder...
...Waste is another way of saying want...
...Where are we headed...
...Standing there, staring at the spits of snow in the air, I was entranced...
...How can you explain to him that man is a minority species in this world, that he is here on sufferance, and that nature could do very well without him, that it did very well indeed before man appeared...
...Our weather originates in that atmosphere...
...They had vanished completely...
...January I960 Decline of Literacy The eclipse of literacy is an unhappy possibility, but one which I think we must take increasing account of, as the tendency to curtail reading begins to make its way into our educational system, along with the digest — which may be followed by the digest of the digest...
...I would add that this is, at least in part, a consequence of man's doings...
...They can be dealth with only by a superior revolutionary strategy, and that strategy must seek genuinely to meet the needs of those driven to revolution...
...No more Indian Summer...
...Shut your eyes, turn around twice, point a finger, and make a guess...
...Our climate has its sources in the sun and the motions of the earth...
...to garland and fructify the earth, not to blight and devastate it...
...I know that the stridulating insects have lived their lives, committed their heritage to the egg, and perished...
...They have been here at least a hundred times as long as my own kind...
...After lunch I went out to stretch my legs, up across the home pasture and into the woods on the lower mountainside...
...I remember the chill because it was so unusual...
...The earth's inclination and rotation have been studied for centuries: Elut the coming and going of Ice Ages have been caused by factors not yet analyzed, except that it is known a change of only a few degrees in the earth's temperature can melt polar ice and flood every river valley on earth, or send vast ice sheets plowing down across the continents...
...We can tomatoes for the same reason...
...I had two throwing clubs and a rabbit I had just killed with one of them...
...The snow ended before there was enough to whiten the grass...
...He is the author of two new books: "Hal Borland's Book of Days, "published by Knopf, and "A Place to Begin: The New England Experience," published by Sierra Club Books...
...Nature, the whole world and even the universe, according to his lights, is or should be designed and dedicated to the welfare and happiness of man...
...Is that the way it will end, not with a whimper or a bang but with a big bubble of shaving cream...
Vol. 40 • December 1976 • No. 12
