After sitting in on a couple sessions in the sustainability planning process now underway in Creston I find myself with mixed emotions. Such planning could make an enormous difference in our valley, providing direction for the next half-century. But not much will change unless some influential, energetic, passionate and very determined personalities emerge to put the plan into action.
What optimism I have at the moment comes from two sources. One is that the sessions I have attended did have some young people involved. We need new generations to participate and to lead — we are, after all, talking about their future. Most of our community leaders are at or near retirement age and, to be honest, I don’t see much evidence that many have what it takes to lead, inspire and cajole the majority of citizens to get involved. One of the young folks who is participating shared her excitement about sustainability planning and I was quick to respond — this is the “talk is cheap” part of the process, I said, immediately regretting how negative that comment sounded. But the simple fact is that a couple of dozen people, mostly the usual suspects who are involved in almost everything, who sit at a table and talk is not the same as firing up an entire community to pull in the same direction.
I was struck at Friday’s meeting, though, when architect Christine Ross talked about how sustainability issues have moved from idealistic concepts to mainstream subjects. It’s true. And perhaps that is the most heartening message I took from the hours I spent in meetings on Friday. We aren’t talking in airy-fairy terms any more. As facilitator Shannon Gordon said, “The constraints of the planet are becoming so apparent. The risk of inaction is so obvious.”
In my opinion, it is our valley’s climate and fertile flatlands that offer our great opportunity for the future, which will have greater and greater challenges as fuel prices rise steadily and transportation costs soar. There is a civility to farming communities that we should be grateful for, too. My thoughts go back to a documentary feature on our DVD collection of the HBO series Deadwood. Series creator and main writer David Milch spoke about the harsh language and ill treatment of women in mining communities in the 19th century American West. Miners essentially move into an area to rape the land, he said, and that activity had a great influence on their behaviour — they saw the land as something to exploit and the people around them were commonly treated in the same way.
That observation rang even more true as I read a passage on Monday evening by the great American writer and philosopher Wendell Berry, who had been writing about his grandfather, a tobacco farmer, taking his crop to market and coming home without a cent for his year’s efforts:
“My effort to make sense of this memory and its encompassing history has depended on a pair of terms used by my teacher, Wallace Stegner. He thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: ‘boomers’ and ‘stickers.’ Boomers, he said, are ‘those who pillage and run,’ who want ‘to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,’ whereas stickers are ‘those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.’ ‘Boomer’ names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. ‘Sticker’ names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.
“The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take.
“Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it. Of my grandfather I need to say only that he shared in the virtues and the faults of his kind and time, one of his virtues being that he was a sticker. He belonged to a family who had come to Kentucky from Virginia, and who intended to go no farther. He was the third in his paternal line to live in the neighbourhood of our little town of Port Royal, and he was the second to own the farm where he was born in 1864 and where he died in 1946.”
We are lucky, extremely lucky, that the Creston Valley is populated, in the main, by Stickers. Solid, down-to-earth folk who view life in more than economic terms. Our young sustainability planning participants might, I think, get the support they need to help plan for the future if they learn from our elders, the Stickers who have lived the values that can sustain our community long into the future.
Lorne Eckersley is the publisher of the Creston Valley Advance.