More search for common ground

This is a re-post of an article I published in the Northside News in February 2022 in which I suggest new ways to think about the ways we are connected in the world and how we might reconsider political boundaries and differences.

In the December 2021/January 2022 issue of Northside News, I read with interest Anita Weier’s article ,“How county and city redistricting affect the Northside”. The idea of district boundaries is, at best, an abstraction that divides us into political units that do not altogether conform to, or nurture, relationships formed between neighborhoods and communities over time—people and places connected by roads, woods, wetlands, and waters of all kinds and that take little notice of our administrative lines captured by words used in the article to describe redistricting like “size and shape”, “target population”, and “municipal boundaries”.

Ms. Weier’s article offers opportunity for us to pause and consider what other purposes our political districts and representatives might serve. How might they nurture neighborliness, care, and community and help us define shared work and common ground?

Criteria used by the redistricting committee included, preserving “municipal boundaries,” where possible. Two synonyms for municipal include “civic” and “civil”, both of which relate to local community, words that give warmth and light to our administrative language. Noting that “the size and shape of (her) new district makes sense,” supervisor Ritt nevertheless laments the loss of the Cherokee neighborhoods, for which she has “love”. The language and experience of love is necessary for the body politic and the wellbeing of people and place and relates more closely to the art of governance than to its science or administration. Preserving relationships of affection and love also “makes sense”.

In our social and natural worlds, boundaries often represent the edges of living, interactive and interdependent systems. On Madison’s north side, the waters of the Yahara River and Cherokee Marsh, in all their abundant life and beauty, are visible and enduring evidence of interdependent boundaries and connections—what we have in common with others and must protect.

In his introduction to Mariette Nowak’s Birdscaping in the Midwest: A Guide to Gardening with Native Plants to Attract Birds, Peter H. Raven draws attention to the need for “ordinary people” to cultivate local spaces such as “gardens, parks and other urban and suburban spaces” that “in time become enlarged into corridors and broader expanses of native plant and animal communities”, making them places that we love, keep, and where we want to stay. This, I believe, requires reconsidering the purpose of political boundaries and representation, elevating our common connections and concerns to serve, as Wendell Berry suggests, “what is true, just, and beautiful in our world”.