The Impact of Place

A Keynote Talk given by Laurie Lane-Zucker on the occasion of the

7th Place-Based Education Conference

University of Michigan, Flint

November 8, 2019

Note to my LinkedIn community: Last November I was honored to give a keynote at the international Place-Based Education (PBE) conference. I was very involved in the development of place-based education in the 1990s, and this speaking opportunity gave me a chance to not only reflect on 30 years of work in the impact space, but to make some connections between PBE — the "pedagogy of community" — and economic development, particularly impact investing and entrepreneurship — within the necessary context of systems change. It is a longer piece than I ususally post on LinkedIn. If you would like to download a pdf of the full talk for off-line reading, here is the link.

?Two Sides of a Silver Dollar

This talk is dedicated to the memory of W.S. Merwin (1927-2019)

 Witness

 I want to tell what the forests

were like

I will have to speak

in a forgotten language

and Richard Nelson (1941-2019)

I’ve often thought of the forest as a living cathedral, but this might diminish what it truly is. If I have understood Koyukon teachings, the forest is not merely an expression or representation of sacredness, nor a place to invoke the sacred; the forest is sacredness itself. Nature is not merely created by God; nature is God. Whoever moves within the forest can partake directly of sacredness, experience sacredness with his entire body, breathe sacredness and contain it within himself, drink the sacred water as a living communion, bury his feet in sacredness, touch the living branch and feel the sacredness, open his eyes and witness the burning beauty of sacredness.           

—   The Island Within

?

I would like to thank the Great Lakes Stewardship Initiative and also the University of Michigan Flint for this great honor of addressing the 7th Place-Based Education Conference. I am delighted to have this occasion, this rather unique opportunity, to reflect on the body of my professional work in place-based education and social impact, and also to come back to Michigan. I was last here in Michigan for work purposes in March 1998, when a program I developed and led as the founding Director of The Orion Society, The Forgotten Language Tour, spent several days in Ann Arbor, hosted by the University of Michigan. As was our practice with the Tour, we brought six exceptional writers and poets of place, who were writing for our flagship magazine, Orion, to that stop of the Tour. We had Arizona poet Alison Hawthorne Deming, Montana’s William Kittredge and Annick Smith, the magnificent, ecstatic poet from Colorado Pattiann Rogers, the sage essayist from Indiana Scott Russell Sanders and Michigan’s own Stephanie Mills, who I believe harkens from Maple City. Likely these are familiar names to some or even many of you.

It was also our practice on the Tour, which traveled to over 30 states, starting in 1992, with the mission of "promoting nature literacy — a deeper, more dynamic and creative understanding of our relationship with the natural world — through readings, workshops and discussions", to ask our hosts to invite an diverse collection of local organizations to co-sponsor our visit, hoping that they could use the Tour to generate new synergies within the community. Our host, the wonderful Dr. John Knott of the University’s English Department, did a stellar job, and the list of organizations included: the City of Ann Arbor, the County of Washtenaw, the Ecology Center, the Great Lakes Literary Alliance, the Huron River Watershed Council, the Huron Valley Sierra Club, Mosaic Foundation, Washtenaw Audubon Society, Huron Valley Greens, National Wildlife Federation, Potawatomi Land Trust, Wild Ones, in addition to the University’s College of Literature, Science and the Arts, and the School of Natural Resources and Environment. I remember that when we had our first community dialogue, in a conference room at the university, one participant noted that it was the first time that organizations working on the upper Huron River, north of the city, had ever sat down with organizations doing Huron River conservation south of the city.

The Forgotten Language Tour was a form of evangelism. It was modeled on the medieval troubadour tradition and the anti-war barnstorming poets of the nineteen sixties. Our intention was to barnstorm through regions, to go to places where some like-minded people lived and worked, and to celebrate the unique continuum of nature and culture that defined that place, and to use our presence to raise awareness in the community to significant environmental and social challenges. Our visits gave the residents a space to voice their love of their place, a space to voice their hopes and their worries for that place, their outrages at injustices that might have been part of that place’s story, and the work that was being done to heal, to educate, and to expand and deepen the communities understanding of itself.

Our Tour was inspired by a poem by former Poet Laureate W.S. Merwin. The poem is called “Witness” and it goes “I want to tell what the forests were like, I will have to speak in a forgotten language.” William passed away this past March, and my talk today is dedicated to him. Our Tour also drew inspiration by a collection of poems inspired too by Merwin’s poem, called The Forgotten Language: Contemporary Poets and Nature, edited by Christopher Merrill, Orion’s former poetry editor who now directs the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa.

In 2001, we brought around 30 distinguished writers of place to Merwin’s home in Maui to celebrate his life’s work and to give him Orion’s John Hay Award. We had a practice of making the giving of our annual lifetime achievement award in the recipient’s homeplace in a gathering of peers. I remember walking with William through the lush, perfumed gardens of his property and listening to him catalogue his extraordinary collection of palm trees, which he had spent decades collecting and caring for, and which had become one of the world’s most extensive collections of palms.

Our touring for the Forgotten Language Tour and our John Hay Award celebrations took us to so many places. I was very lucky. I had left two graduate degree programs midstream in order to develop The Orion Society and build its programs, yet rarely regretted the lack of an advanced degree because our work brought me into close working proximity to many of the finest minds in the sustainability field.

These travels took us to Michoacán, Mexico to celebrate the writings and conservation work of Homero Aridjis, and we walked with him through the monarch butterfly wintering grounds that he has worked so passionately to protect. I remember the morning light shimmering through branches weighed down by the collective weight of millions of bejeweled butterflies, and the thousands of monarchs that flittered around each of us like fairies sprinkling dream dust. On the way to and from the preserve, we passed on the road logging trucks full of their recently cut loads. That night I recall gathering amid candlelit to hear Homero and his dear friend William Merwin trade off reciting their poems to us like dueling banjos.

I remember traveling to the “nearsighted naturalist” and writer Ann Zwinger’s home of Colorado Springs in 1996, and visiting her famous grove of aspen trees. I remember wondering with her on the ride back to town whether we were living in the last days of a Golden Age on Earth, when most of the world’s biodiversity still had a foothold on this human-besieged planet.

I remember that same year taking our Forgotten Language Tour to the wilds of Montana’s Yaak Valley. The extraordinary writer and champion of the Yaak, Rick Bass, had pleaded with us to bring our traveling band of evangelists to the wildest place in the lower 48 to support their efforts to protect that wilderness from the rampant extractive industries. One of our days in the Yaak was particularly memorable. I had the pleasure on one of our field trips of sharing a canoe with Rick as we met a nasty swell on the engorged Yaak River and of us needing to be fished out of that river, chilled to the bone, after we capsized. A couple hours later, when Rick and the Yaak Valley Forest Council were leading us through an old growth forest a tornado system suddenly raged through and a large pine tree fell just a few feet from us as we were faced down and humbled by nature’s sublimity. And a few hours after that, after we had circumnavigated roads littered with fallen trees and the sound of chainsaws, we reached the lodge where we were to give a public reading, and I remember introducing what was a particularly magical evening in a large space entirely lit by candles as there was no electricity in the valley due to the storm — the room was packed to the gills, shadowy arms and legs wrapped around the lodgepole supports on the balcony. Rick Bass read about hunting alone in the deep snow in grizzly country. Robert Michael Pyle shared some of his stories of seeking the mystical bigfoot in the wilds of Washington, Richard Nelson read his famous chapter from The Island Within of opening up the doors and windows of his Alaska home to let a fierce storm inside.

I remember in 1997 sharing a few days with the poet Gary Snyder at his home in the foothills of Sierra Nevadas. Of sitting cross-legged with him in his zendo as he spoke of learning the flowers, of going light.

I remember hiking with Terry Tempest Williams and Gary Paul Nabhan through the red-rock majesty of the Canyonlands in the desert southwest. Of being on the trail in Arches National Park with the richly bearded biologist and writer Robert Michael Pyle, and him being confused by strangers, not for the first time, for Jerry Garcia.

I remember our weekends with Peter Matthiessen, author of The Snow Leopard at his home on Long Island, the great biologist and biophiliac E.O. Wilson on the Vineyard, and with Jane Goodall, the Mother Teresa of the conservation movement. I remember several dozen of us gathering in Port Royal, Kentucky to celebrate the genius of Wendell Berry, and of an evening of hilarity as Wendell and his great friend Wes Jackson traded midwestern farmer jokes, of which I learned there is quite the catalogue. I remember our days in Finn Rock, Oregon, with Barry Lopez as he shared with us his world of wolves and men, as well as his Arctic dreams.

I remember taking our Forgotten Language Tour to my alma mater in Middlebury, Vermont, and going with our group of writers on a pilgrimage to the legendary poet Robert Frost’s cabin. I remember, completely against the rules, three of the writers climbing onto Frost’s rickety old double bed, and frolicking, and demanding that I take a picture of their threesome, and then afterwards, pleading with me to keep their grave offense secret. And, true to my word, to this day I have not mentioned Terry’s, Gary’s and Nels’ naughtiness to anyone!

I remember, also in the mid 90s, when Poet Laureate Robert Hass asked us to help him organize an environmental writers conference at the Library of Congress. We called it Watershed: Writers, Nature and Community. I suggested to him that in addition to the 40 or 50 writers and poets we were inviting that we also invite some of the grassroots environmental, educational, and social justice organizations that we had met on our travels. He liked the idea although we had no idea how many people would feel strongly enough about our conference and these writers to show up. Well, happily, some did show up. 3000 people showed up. It was the largest conference that had ever happened at the United States Library of Congress. Bob Hass launched his River of Words poetry and art contest there.

During that conference, I remember driving several of the writers to PBS to do a live interview for the Newshour. It was rush hour, we were late, and as I wove through the rabid rush hour DC traffic with Wendell Berry, Gary Snyder, Robert Hass and Barry Lopez chatting happily in the passenger seats the thought struck me about what a burden my right foot was carrying at that moment. I am sure it spent more time on the brake than the accelerator.

After Watershed, we established the Orion Grassroots Network and a second magazine, Orion Afield, to support place-centered work around North America. We had over 1000 organizations as members by the time I left Orion. Watershed also led to another gathering, a 1999 millennium conference we organized at the National Conservation Training Center. It was called Fire & Grit: Working for Nature in Community. Once again, we invited place-focused organizations around the country to join leading environmental writers. I could never get over just how strong the affinity is between those two groups. The number of grassroots organizations, just to give one example, that were founded upon, or at least deeply inspired by Wendell Berry’s writing about community, agriculture and life is truly astonishing.

This decade plus of peripatetic programming around place, which I have provided a few glimpses of, and where I had the profound pleasure of working closely with and learning from the finest contemporary writers of place, who serve arguably the oldest and grandest American literary tradition — here I give a bow to Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, Wallace Stegner and the others of that lineage — this decade plus of work trying to revivify our forgotten language of community, of place, had yet another expression.

In the early years of the 1990s, alongside these other initiatives, we started working on developing a new pedagogy of place. In this effort, we looked not only to the work of some of our advisory board members, like Wendell, David Orr, who at the time was writing a book called Ecological Literacy, Indiana’s Scott Russell Sanders, who was writing a book called Staying Put, and Barry Lopez, who had just come out with a small but potent book called The Rediscovery of North America, but we also drew guidance from small meetings we convened. The person I worked most closely with in these efforts was Dr. John Elder, who I had studied with in undergraduate and graduate school and who I knew to be deeply knowledgeable about the long tradition of nature writing, having recently edited with Robert Finch the first major anthology of the tradition for Norton Books, and as a pioneering professor at Middlebury College. John helped us host our think-tank sessions, and later he led some of our first programs in this area. With funding support from the Geraldine R. Dodge Foundation, we produced some initial classroom projects, and then started giving $1000 teaching fellowships to teachers around the country to experiment in the classroom. We launched a series of small format books about this work, called the Nature Literacy Series, with titles like Into the Field and Stories in the Land, and we organized several week-long Orion teacher training institutes that John led at another of my alma mater’s, the Bread Loaf School of English.

Our funding partners at the Dodge Foundation, Scott McVay, Alexandra Christy and Robert Perry, were pleased with our progress and funded us over the course of several years. They weren’t thrilled about one thing, however. We didn’t have a name for this pedagogy, observed Robert to me in a meeting we had around 1995, as I prepared to write and submit our latest grant proposal. It would be good to have one. I agreed, so I called John Elder and said that we needed to come up with a name for all the work we had been doing over the past several years. We started playing around doing that brainstorming thing, where we tossed language to each other like volleyball players. I remember John naming a number of core principles for this type of education: “it is holistic, interdisciplinary, creative, community-centric, place-based,” he rattled off. “Hold on,” I said, “place-based…” “place-based education”. I like the ring of that. Let’s run with that one.

And so we did.

After the preliminary work in pedagogical development I have described, our goal was to seed these ideas into the culture so others could take the principles and early models, and adapt them to their own places, and thereby advance the pedagogy further. We used our magazines, our book series, our institutes and conferences, our Forgotten Language Tour and John Hay Award weekends all as a way to disperse those seeds. In 2004, in my last act at Orion, after 13 years as Director, we published the first book explicitly on the pedagogy, entitled Place-based Education: Connecting Classrooms and Communities. David Sobel of Antioch New England Graduate School, who, with his colleagues Mitch and Cindy Thomashow and Tom Wessels, had become one of our close collaborators during this process, penned the book. I contributed the foreword, where I laid out some of this history and core working principles that I have just shared with you. Here is some of what I said in that Foreword:

“In an increasingly globalized world, there are often pressures for communities and regions to subordinate themselves to the dominant economic models and to devalue their local cultural identity, traditions and history in preference to a flashily marketed homogeneity. Furthermore, at a time when [climate change], industrial pollution, biodiversity/habitat loss, and aquifer depletion are becoming widespread and acute, such pressures often exacerbate the problems by encouraging unsustainable patterns of consumption and land use, and by weakening familial and community relationships that are deeply tied to the local environment. A process of disintegration occurs as basic connections to the land fray and communities become less resilient and less able to deal with the dislocations that globalization and ecological deterioration bring about. A community's health—human and more-than-human—suffers.

The path to a sustainable existence must start with a fundamental reimagining of the ethical, economic, political and spiritual foundations upon which society is based, and that this process needs to occur within the context of a deep local knowledge of place. The solutions to many of our ecological problems lie in an approach that celebrates, empowers and nurtures the cultural, artistic, historical and spiritual resources of each local community and region, and champions their ability to bring those resources to bear on the healing of nature and community.

Schools and other educational institutions can and should play a central role in this process, but for the most part they do not. Indeed, they have often contributed to the problem by educating young people to be, in David Orr's words, 'mobile, rootless and autistic toward their places.' A significant transformation of education might begin with the effort to learn how events and processes close to home relate to regional, national, and global forces and events, leading to a new understanding of ecological stewardship and community. This, I believe, supports the propagation of an enlightened localism—a local/global dialectic that is sensitive to broader ecological and social relationships at the same time as it strengthens and deepens peoples’ sense of community and land.

Place-based education might be characterized as the pedagogy of community, the reintegration of the individual into her homeground and the restoration of the essential links between a person and her place. Place-based education challenges the meaning of education by asking seemingly simple questions: Where am I? What is the nature of this place? What sustains this community? It often employs a process of re-storying, whereby students are asked to respond creatively to stories of their homeground so that, in time, they are able to position themselves, imaginatively and actually, within the continuum of nature and culture in that place. They become a part of the community, rather than a passive observer of it.

That was 2004. Those were my, and very nearly Orion’s, last words on the matter. I left Orion that year and the Orion board not long after decided the organization was overstretched with all these programs — we undoubtedly were financially overstretched; I had just come to the conclusion that being overstretched simply came with the job of running a nonprofit — and the Board decided to refocus the finite resources firmly back on the magazine.

Place-based education, if it was to survive, was left to others to advance. Well, almost. I couldn’t quite let PBE go entirely. I started a think-tank in 2005 called the Triad Institute, focused on advancing what I call a “triadic” understanding of citizenship for a fast-globalizing and ecologically challenged world. A triadic way of thinking is simultaneously deeply local or place-based, national and global. I believe that we need a sophisticated understanding at each of these levels, with each constantly informing the other, to effectively grapple with the massive social and environmental challenges of our time.

Think of the monarch butterfly. It is a truly international species, migrating miraculously across generations and thousands of miles. And it is also a profoundly local species. If Homero Aridjis and lepidoptrists Lincoln Brower and Robert Michael Pyle and the other vocal protectors of the monarch’s wintering habitat lose their battle with the loggers on those few precious acres in Michoacán, Mexico, then this extraordinary pollinator of other species as well as of our creative imaginations will be lost forever. If the idiocy and moral bankruptcy we call modern politics builds its wall along the US/Mexican border, how many other species alongside monarchs will suffer? 

That fortress mentality, that literal mindset that needs to erect walls and to distinguish between an “us” and a “them” in order to navigate one’s sense of self and one’s sense of self-worth, is not only a dead end, it is in truth the beginning of the end for all of us.

One of my Triad Institute projects was a collaboration with the Christensen Fund and Aga Khan Foundation in Central Asia. I designed and co-led, with Robert Michael Pyle, what I believe was the first effort to introduce place-based education beyond North America. We spent a week on the other side of the world in Dushanbe, Tajikistan introducing PBE to several dozen educators from three Central Asian countries. I learned many things from that project, but the biggest takeaway was that place-based education is something that can comfortably be translated to a wider set of geographies and cultures, even if you need two translators working with you, as we did, to do that project.

That was 2005. Fourteen years ago. I want to tell you what I have been doing in the interim and how that work has informed both my understanding and the importance of place-based education, as well as share with you new areas where PBE could contribute significant value in the years ahead, to the extent that it is not already doing so.

In 2006, I founded my first company. Hotfrog. It actually started as a nonprofit project through the Triad Institute, but along the way I became aware of a new phenomenon that was just launching at that time aimed at creating a new type of business grounded in what’s called the “triple bottom line” — the triple bottom line being a company that serves people and planet while also trying to be profitable”. I had not spent the 90s collaborating closely with Wendell Berry, the sage of local economy, and barnstorming through college communities on our Forgotten Language Tour with Bill McKibben, who used the Tour for some of his earliest grassroots climate advocacy efforts, to not feel deeply that as hard as governments and the charitable sector try, it is the private sector that needs not only to be reformed, actually transformed, but that the private sector needed to be fully enlisted in the cause of creating and investing in a sustainable and equitable world.

So I ended up turning Hotfrog into one of the very first “B Corporations” in 2007. B stands for “benefit” or “for benefit”. These days one can set up a company as a legal entity — a benefit corporation — in over 30 states, including, happily, Michigan. One can also get an existing company “Certified B” by an organization called B Lab, which is based in Pennsylvania. My company was one of the first 25 Certified B Corporations. There are now over 3000 Certified B Corporations in the US and it is becoming a potent international movement as well. In Latin America, for example, the movement is called “Sistema B”.

So I drank the kool aid of triple bottom line business and decided to devote the next chunk of my career to doing “business for good” or what is commonly called social enterprise. I also became a strong advocate for something else that emerged in 2007 alongside the B Corporations. That thing is call impact investing. Impact Investors invest in companies that are committed to the triple bottom line. My company, Hotfrog, had the first ever impact investment on an impact investing equity exchange in 2011. In recent years, impact investing, driven by the increasingly urgent social and environmental challenges that we can now see well defined in the United Nation’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, also called the SDGs or Global Goals, has become one of the fastest growing sectors of finance and investment, greatly driven by millennials, who are in the process of becoming the inheritors of the largest transfer of wealth in human history, an estimated 30-50 trillion dollars over the next several decades. Impact investing is unleashing growing amounts of capital toward social and environment good. The space has been doubling in size each of the past several years, according to the Global Impact Investing Network.

In 2011, I coined the term “impact entrepreneur” and created a new business with the same name. I call my business Impact Entrepreneur an “impact economy company”, because the foundational notion behind impact entrepreneurship is that we need to both build businesses that do measureable good in the world but that we also need to build a new business paradigm and ecosystem ? a new economy, an “impact economy”, around those businesses. As you may have gleaned, I like to do field-building and I like to build networks. With Impact Entrepreneur I have built a 22,000-member global network of entrepreneurs, investors, scholars and students. I call them “systems-minded changemakers”. Impact Entrepreneur does a variety of educational and field-building programs and consults with entrepreneurs, investors and academic institutions to build the impact space. For example, last year we did a project with Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors that was focused on the ways foundations and philanthropists and the trillion dollars of philanthropic capital in foundations can be more involved in impact investing and impact economy building. We produced two reports, including a Call to Action for the philanthropy sector, as part of that initiative. Just a few weeks ago, we produced a report for the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools to help the 7000 charter schools understand and seek impact investing, something that might please those who feel that charter schools only take money from public school budgets.

So this is how I have been spending my time in recent years. I have not had the bandwidth nor the resources to focus on place-based education, however I have admired from afar some of the vibrant PBE initiatives, such as the establishment of the Center for Place-based Education at Antioch New England Graduate School, and the involvement of the Pew Foundation, which for a time brought significant rigor and resources to the field.

What has struck me even more forcibly has been just how deeply place-based education, place-based ideas and place-based thinking have become engrained in our culture over the past couple decades. This is not simply an increasingly sophisticated and widespread pedagogical movement practiced by school and nature centers. This is, I would argue, a cultural phenomenon, and, I would further argue, one that those in this room are centrally responsible for having cultivated. Politicians now talk about place alongside or within their notions of community and community representation. Organizations and businesses now promote their sensitivities to place, touting their place-based values.

Two or three years ago, I was pointed to a website produced by a coalition of foundations based in the Pacific Northwest, led by the Russell Family Foundation. The initiative was called Canopy. Its goal was to nurture “place-based impact investing” in the region. They started with a place-based mapping project and set out strategies for developing socially and environmentally focused companies through “place-based investing”. Place-based investing is now becoming a rage among community foundations, and initiatives like the MacArthur Foundation’s Benefit Chicago program. Just this week, the Rockefeller Foundation and Smart Growth America announced a new initiative to “create place-based, community-led approaches to developing sustainable growth and development strategies that help transform selected Opportunity Zones into economically-thriving and socially-inclusive, walkable neighborhoods.”

What I am pointing to is a phenomenon that may be undervalued in the community of place-based educators. The writing of place, the tying of education to place, the years of extricating your students from the confines of the school walls in order to cultivate an ethic of place. These efforts have begun to work their alchemy on the broader culture. And in more ways than we think! So congratulations, and THANK YOU for your efforts.

Yet, obviously, we all have a lot more work to do. Climate change, biodiversity loss, ocean pollution and acidification, the loss of fresh, potable water, whether it be because of melting glaciers, drying aquifers, or for other reasons. Incredible amounts of inequality, political parties that act more like organized crime syndicates. Corruption. Cowardice. Racism. Intolerance. I could go on and on.

But I don’t need to that here, do I? We are in Flint. Flint, Michigan. We all know about Flint. And you who are from here know a lot better about what goes on here than I do. I was in the airport yesterday waiting for my flight to Flint, and working on this talk. My phone pinged and the notification was from The New York Times. A new story had just dropped. In one of those strange moments of synchronicity, as if the universe had decided to send me a few more lines for my talk, it was a new story by their investigative reporter Erica Green about Flint. She discusses the ongoing water and health crisis here in Flint, and the profound impact it has had on the city’s youth and schools. The piece reveals in excruciating detail the ongoing, rising cost of systemic failure — the failure of the political system, the health system and the educational system, particularly for the most vulnerable. It breaks my heart.

However, we know from ecologists that after the scourge of a forest fire a forest ecosystem is primed for rebound. The fire burns the dead and decaying matter, returning their nutrients to the soil. The fire acts as a disinfectant removing disease-ridden plants and harmful insects from an ecosystem (National Geographic article on the benefits of wildfire, Oct. 25, 2019). There is a chance not only for renewal, but for transformative change to occur.

Here is where place-based education can and should step in, as a vehicle for helping the community re-locate its authentic roots, to reconnect citizens to the natural and cultural continuum that makes this place unique, and, significantly, to till the soil for the shoots of innovation, of entrepreneurship and conscious investment to take root. To ground community discussions of economic development in the context of what is possible here, and what does this place want? What does this place want? Place-based education can and should provide the path to impact entrepreneurship and mission-centric impact investing. Place-based education and impact entrepreneurship need not only to be in same conversation, they need to be leading the conversation, together, like the two sides of a silver dollar.

Education can be compared to the root system of an aspen grove. It can sustain the essential elements of a community, visible and less visible, feeding and reinforcing that unique and fragile and beautiful substructure of a place, its history and its present, and revealing its essential oneness. Education can be compared to the system of water piping that threads through and under a community, connecting house to house, house to store, store to school, school to Town Hall. That piping, however, can rust through inattention, and begin to spread impurities, to become a toxic transmission system. Education can be compared to a geological system of fault lines. It can create tremors of unrest, it can create major shifts of the cultural crust, of the mantle of the body politic, and it can instigate a transformation of mind, heart and soul.

Place-based education is not simply an invigorating and essential break from the classroom, it is not simply a way of attuning the individual to her or his community, place-based education is not simply a method of cultivating a grounded, environmental ethic. Place-based education also needs to create the foundation for the building of a new cultural and economic system, informed by triadic thinking and motivated by the triple bottom line. It needs to protect its few acres in Michoacán but also attend to the places where the monarchs migrate to. Brexit and America First are not going to be effective operating principles in this century. Our working principles need to be those of the impact economy: resilient, regenerative, circular, metaphorically minded and heart-centered — through love and compassion for self and other.

And what of the place-based educator? One of my great mentors, Barry Lopez, has a word that he shared with me many years ago. It is a word he brought back with him from his time with native peoples in interior Alaska. The word is pronounced “Assimatook”. Don’t ask me to spell it, because the word assimatook lives in the oral tradition of the Athabaskans. He told me that there is not a strict translation for it. The closest might be “teacher”, but, he said, that really wasn’t it. The closest description he had for the word assimatook was “the person who is present when wisdom reveals itself.” I am not sure how well that fits with you. Many of you are professional educators. I only taught school for a year before graduate school. I can tell you, however, that for me, and the work that I have done over these last 30 years, assimatook has been a powerful operating principle as I have helped to build the field, design networks, organize convenings, and mentor students.

I mentioned that in 1999 I organized a millennium conference at the National Conservation Training Center called Fire & Grit: Working for Nature in Community. It was a very rich gathering, dozens of environmental writers joined by representatives from hundreds of grassroots organizations. On the last night of the conference, we organized an event at the nearby Antietam National Battlefield, which as you may know is the bloodiest parcel of land in United States history. On those few acres, 22,720 Union and Confederate soldiers died or were wounded in a single day, September 17, 1862. The Antietam River ran red that day. Five days later, on September 22nd, 1862 President Lincoln issued the preliminary Emancipation Proclamation.

Orion’s chairman, Marion Gilliam, Barry Lopez and I designed an evening program on the battlefield’s main hill to close our conference. The theme was sacrifice — or rather the sacrificing of oneself for the larger cause of social justice. We gathered 2000 luminaria — paper bags that hold small candles, one luminaria for each year that marked the second millennium — and we laid them out in the curving shape of a river rolling down that bloody hillside. At dusk, we invited the hundreds of people gathered for the event to light the luminarias. There was music by a fiddler whose great grandfather was killed in battle on the hill, there was poetry, and just as the night descended and our river of light reached full luminescence, a wireless microphone was passed from person to person sitting on the hillside. Voices rose in the darkness, one voice spoke quiet words of tribute and remembrance, another sang an a cappella of Amazing Grace, another recited a poem. And in between there was silence. Then, without bidding, a person stood up from the darkened crowd and walked over to a bend in the river and entered its light. And then another person followed. And then another.

I too was moved to walk in the river and I slowly moved through the spaces between the luminarias, down the hill, until I reach the bottom where the river tapered to an end. There, I found standing alone our cherished writer of place, Terry Tempest Williams, who I had spent many a day with on our Forgotten Language Tours and other programs and who I soon would work with on her book, The Open Space of Democracy. Terry and I smiled at each other and then, her hand in mine, we turned and looked up the hill at the full river of redemptive light. And then something magical happened. A breeze picked up and hastened down that hill and through that river of light. The wind travelled to each of those 2000 luminaria and they shivered. And those hundreds of people who were now walking through the river, their dark figures began to shimmer, and it was not a large leap of the imagination to believe that we were suddenly seeing the souls of the Antietam dead rising amid the river of light to commune with us and greet the night.

In my Foreword to Terry’s book, The Open Space of Democracy, I quote Terry saying, “In the open space of democracy, we are listening — ears alert — we are watching — eyes open — registering the patterns and possibilities for engagement. Some acts are private, some are public. Our oscillations between local, national and global gestures map the full range of our movement. Our strength lies in our imagination, and paying attention to what sustains life, rather than what destroys it.”

This triadic oscillation between the local, national and global is anchored by the local. The place-based. It is an enlightened localism. Without an education that teaches enlightened localism, the pedagogy of community, without an education founded on what Aldo Leopold calls “the land ethic” and includes as an essential part of our humanity what David Abram calls the “more than human world” we will be autistic to our places and to our Earth. As Sandra Steingraber writes in Living Downstream, “From the right to know and the duty to inquire flows the obligation to act.”

In this sense we are all entrepreneurs, impact entrepreneurs, witnessing the just and the unjust, carrying the transformational light, sacrificing for the greater good, innovating a sustainable and equitable economy, and investing our time and resources in the transformation of culture. Living as if the soul of the Earth and our own soul were one.

Thank you.

Like the trees, we are visitors, guests of the earth.

—   Kim Stafford