I.

Dear Liza:

I have been carrying your summer letter around with me in my environmental journal, composing in my head and on this machine, fully intending to get a letter/response off to you before now. Today in the SPO was the alumni magazine with your "A Lower Education" in it, and it prompted me to get on with writing to you.

At the end of the summer letter you had inquired, "How's the fly-fishing?" Let me begin there and work my way, back upstream as it were, to the Sewanee Environmental Network (SEN, for now).

The fishing is poor to so-so. You know I fish the Timsford tailwaters of the Elk River below Winchester. [I fish other places as well, but I regard the Elk as my home stream.] When I began fishing the Elk in 1988, it was regarded as one of the great secret trout streams of Tennessee. The water was clear, there were hundreds of fish, and most importantly, the food chain in the river was ample to support the fish and hundreds of birds that zoomed over the water as well. Trout of 16-18" were common and many fish above 20" were taken. I described many of my experiences my first three years on the Elk in the journal I have enclosed. It was a rich and rewarding passage of fishing, not least because it taught me to know a river, and in knowing the river, its land and people.

Then, in the late fall of 1990, a great storm changed the Elk--and precipitated for me a new chapter in my ecological awareness. I referred to this storm in my subsequent writings as the "Great Solstice Storm." The storm--actually a powerful, but very slow moving low pressure system--made up over Mexico around the 17th or 18th of December. By the 21st it had drifted across Texas, toward Arkansas and northern Louisiana. Winter storms here, as you know, tend to track toward Memphis thence north and west of the plateau and eventually work themselves out in Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and New York or they tend to veer around Tuscaloosa and take what I call the Birmingham-Chattanooga track. These southern storms sweep the southern part of the plateau and the southern Appalachians, working themselves out across Georgia, North Carolina, and Virginia before heading up the East Coast.

In 1990, because of a combination of a strong high pressure area over the central midwest and another low-pressure system over northern Florida, the Great Solstice Storm took a track seldom taken here. It veered east just south of Memphis and began to track slowly toward Columbia, Fayetteville, and Winchester. Somewhere between Columbia and Fayetteville, it stalled for about 30 hours, making little eastward or northern progress. The leading edge of this storm--and spin-off from the Florida low--had already caused rain across Tennessee for several days. By the 22nd, the ground was saturated and puddles were standing everywhere. Friday evening, the 22nd, it began to rain steadily about 10:00. It rained steadily, but not really hard, for the next thirty hours. We recorded 15.5" of rain.

By 10:00 a.m. Saturday, roads in the valley were under water, bridges were already being eroded by flooding streams, and water was backing up in the basement of Walsh, the new Telecommunications Center, Hamilton Hall, the Gym, Bairnwick, and in several of the dorms. I was in my truck, riding the county and the campus, taking pictures and coordinating by radio the effort to pump out the basements of university buildings. About 8 miles from here, between Monteagle and Tracy City is Payne Cove. 16+" of rain fell in Payne Cove and--more to the point--on the plateau above it. The stream in Payne Cove, like the small stream beyond Mr. Lytle's house in the Assembly, and like the stream in Abbo's Alley, is part of the tributary watershed system of the Elk River. By Saturday evening, that stream in Payne Cove was running 20 feet deep and in some places a half mile wide. The Sewanee Fire Department Mountain Rescue Team and the Sewanee EMS conducted a highwater rescue using ropes, pulleys, and baskets for the people trapped in the cove. [Chattanooga TV filmed it as our crews worked.]

The tributaries of the Elk acted as a physical multiplier of the water, channeling and concentrating--and deepening it. Hundreds and hundreds of millions of gallons flowed down the Elk, cascading into the first impoundment, Woods Reservoir. At the Woods Reservoir dam and control house, the work crew knew something was amiss. The waters rose rapidly, and before TVA clearance could be acquired to release downstream, the dam was nearly overwhelmed. The floodgates jammed and in the control house the windows broke under the tension and the dam itself surged and vibrated. Finally with the help of a commercial crane, the floodgates were raised. The resultant bore of water tore down the middle valley of the Elk sweeping over the Mill Road bridge where it drowned one man who was crossing the bridge in his truck. The bridge, which is 20 feet above the river would eventually be under nearly 8 feet of water.

This flood poured into the next impoundment, Tims Ford Reservoir. Tims Ford is a big lake, and had enough surface area to receive most of the water, but it caused the lake level to rise to within 18" of the top of the floodgates at the Tims Ford Dam. They held the water as long as they could. By Christmas Eve, it was clear that water would go over the gates and thus begin to threaten the dam itself. By the 26th, TVA had the floodgates open 9'. That does not sound like much, but it meant that a volume of water greater than the 250,000 gal. capacity of the Sewanee water tank was flowing out of the dam every second. The effect of this water was hard to understand. Afterwards, its grosser effects were apparent everywhere in the river valley: barns and houses were washed away, bridges were washed out, fields were flooded for miles to depths of 15 to 20', livestock and wildlife were swept away, roads were "un-asphalted" where the rush of the waters lifted the asphalt off the roadbed, great log jams of trees, building debris, and trash were mountained into place at the heads of islands, under bridges, and in the bends of the river, the work or some mad ecologic Caliban building a landfill of trees and limbs. On the 30th the still surging waters claimed their next victim, Jonathan Acklen, whose boat overturned at one of the places I fish. Because my truck has several emergency radios I ran the search command post until the sheriff's department could get organized. We found Jonathan about 9:30 a.m. New Year's Day 1991.

The smaller effects of the flood were harder to see, but to a biologist or an angler were just as real, and in certain ways more important. In the weeks and months after the flood I made hundreds of photos of the Elk River valley from Paynes Cove far down the river below Tims Ford, and I walked the banks and fields below the dam [which for a while were covered with hundreds of thousands of large and small fish displaced by the flood and then trapped when the waters finally went down]. Since then, I have continued to study the river, and now--eighteen months afterward--as the waters have begun to clear and flow cold again, I have explored the bottom and re-learned the river by wading. The smaller effects of the flood are many and they interact in a synergistic and complex way. I will try to sort some of them out as best I can, and then try to relate this to the SEN and your letter to me.

First, flood waters are violent and have unbelievable force and do great damage. [I found places where boulders the size of beachballs were lodged 5 or 6' off the ground in the forks of trees!] Flood waters are also muddy [this is not just a hydrologic truism, but an ecological/environmental problem as well]. Just a few hours into the Great Solstice Storm, every stream in the valley of Franklin County was running brown with the soil and silt being eroded from the land. Now this erosion, even in "century" storms is a natural phenomenon and not to be lamented. However, the siltation in the streams and river and in the lake was not natural because of the abuse of land that has occurred all across the Elk watershed. During the summer and fall of 1990 in particular it seemed as if a frenzy of bulldozing had overtaken the local valley farmers. Tens of miles of fencerows and hedges and half-lanes were bulldozed, shoved into piles and burned. By the 1990 solstice the edges of the fields were raw, unprotected earth sores. In the storm, these fields eroded rapidly and the ditches ran red with soil and the lake was silted in for month after month.

This silt has numerous effects: it's removal physically destroys the land, it fills and chokes all tributary streams, it fills in the lake bed, it adds 'color' to the water of the reservoir, it brings with it the nutrients and chemicals that have been sprayed on roads, lawns, and fields, and it "shocks" the watercourse and the lake--that is, it creates a sudden change in the water chemistry of the lake and river, smothering some life forms, buffering some chemical reactions, altering others, changing the pH of the streams and river, and favoring certain phytoplanktons. The silt also alters the light regimen of the lake water, and has some effect upon temperature. The result, whether in the little tributary streams, in the edges of the lake, or in the river, is that the normal reproductive processes and the prevailing ecologic balance of species is upset.

The violence of the floodwaters--"spate" is the stream hydrologists' term [see Hynes, The Ecology of Running Waters]--also has another effect besides eroding the land and carrying silt, debris and trash into the watersystem. The hydraulic vortex created by the floodgates not only lifted plates of limestone rock out of the streambed and tossed them into the air, but scoured and plowed as effectively as any bulldozer the entire streambed below the dam. The gravel and sand substrate of the grass, moss, and algae beds was overturned--as if by a plow--so that rock that was on the bottom of the river fill was rolled over, shoved downstream and eventually ended up now on top of the fill. Sometimes the vertical displacement of the bottom was as much as 5'. The micro-invertebrates living in the upper 1" of the bottom fill were utterly destroyed in the main course of the river. On the Elk, the spate of the Great Solstice Storm severed the food chain, swept away the fish, and smothered the bottom in silt.

Without adequate phyto/zoo plankton, the rotifers and associated grazers have no food, without rotifers and their sort, the caddisfly and mayfly larvae have no food, without caddisflies and mayflies the trout have no food. [The relationships here are both more numerous and more complexly interrelated, but you understand the significance of foodchains.] Neither do the birds and spiders that feed on the hatching insects have any food. I caught very few fish in 1991. Although I keep almost no fish, I occasionally keep a few to share/study: often I give the fish to Mr. Lytle who likes trout and I give the gut to Dr. Yeatman who sorts and types the gut content for me. In 1991 most of the trout on the Elk had thin, shrunken bellies, and the gut content was algae and snails. Very few birds zoomed the waters, and the spiderwebs along the bank held very few mayflies.

Rivers do not quickly recover from spates, particularly once-in-a-century floods. Ordinary 10 to 25 year-type storms may require 3 to 5 years of recovery on a river. I knew the 1990 flood had hurt the Elk, but just as we thought we were going into a recovery, another storm in late November-early December 1991 dumped another 15 inches of rain across the watershed. Fortunately the rainfall of the 1991 storm occurred over about 60 hours instead of 30, so the erosive effects were not so violent on the land. The lake refilled, however, and the floodgates again had to be opened, re-scouring the riverbottom just as it appeared recovery was beginning. I am now beginning to find mayfly

larvae well downstream from the dam, and I occasionally see a few flying as I fish. The great trout fishery of the Elk River has been destroyed, however. The fish are gone, despite the hatchery stocking. After the initial stocking of hatchery rainbow in April-May of this year, I caught only one other rainbow trout all summer. The food chain and water conditions--chemical balance, temperature, grass beds--required for the trout to survive, grow, and carry over are just not there.

Throughout 1991 and now into 1992 and I took my photos and as I walked the fields and banks, I have tried to understand this flood event on the Elk and to try to see it from the bottom of the streambed where I fish back up to the top of the river and its banks and then back upstream to where it originated. Part, not all certainly, but a real part, of the destruction of the Elk where I fish was caused by Sewanee, in particular by the University of the South. The Domain, of course, occupies only a fraction of the total watershed area of the Elk River, but that fraction is significant to me for two reasons. First, all the developed areas of the watershed contribute more pollution to the river than equal areas of non-developed watershed. This is true not only with respect to rates of "natural" erosion but also with respect to the amounts of nutrients, pollutants, etc, that the unit sub-area contributes to the watershed.

The Sewanee fraction of the Elk watershed is significant for a second reason: it is that fraction of the watershed occupied and owned by the University of the South: an enlightened and concerned liberal arts school in the Christian tradition with a first rate science program, department of natural resources, and producer of students like you. It is also a school lost in a romantic, anti-agrarian dreamworld that has not equipped its own students with the education necessary to let them understand the pollution of the Elk River watershed that begins on the Quad and under the eaves of their dormitory windows. Where do we suppose the silt in Boiling Fork Creek [along the highway to Cowan] comes from? What happens to the chemicals that we spray on the grass in the cracks of the sidewalk in front of Walsh so that Sewanee won't look seedy when its alums return? What happens to the excess nitrogen and phosphates in the fertilizer that we dump on the Manigault lawn? What happens to the breakdown or decomposition products that we spray on the ivy of the Chapel to "control" insects? What happens to the lawnmower/leafblower exhaust fumes that are ejected into the air when the lawns are kept neatly mowed?

Where did the silt from the excavation and backfill of Clement Chen Hall go in 1990 because the contractor was not required to put up silt fencing while that house was built? [It ran down North Carolina Avenue, past Cleveland Dorm, past my house, into the feeder stream of Abbo's Alley, thence into Miller Cove, Boiling Fork Creek, thence into Tims Ford Lake and the Elk River.] And where is the silt now smothering Abbo's Alley stream coming from and going as we begin another major construction project without silt fencing [see enclosed photos]? My point is not to find fault with Sewanee, much less to accuse particular administrators. [Please! Do not dash off a letter of attack

against the administration. See below.] The point rather, is that our dear Sewanee is no more a solution to the environmental problems of America or Franklin County than is the Hamilton Place Shopping Mall in Chattanooga. In fact, it is the same kind of problem as that mall: it occupies a watershed niche without responsibility and without accountability. It is not that certain people have "abused" Sewanee, less even that certain people are evil. Not that at all. Every person in the faculty and administration I talk to is interested in, concerned about, the general problem of environmental eduatation and ethical environmental behavior--yet they do not see the specific ramifications of the problem in the very domain they administer--or teach about.

I am sorry to put it this way, but this is what I think: Sewanee's "lower education" is the naive sentiment of tree huggers and grass humpers who do not understand what is going on. Sewanee is not the solution. Sewanee is the problem [locally, but also globally because the naive views acquired here are carried--as you correctly understand--with our graduates when they leave and thus Sewanee "education" continues to have effect far beyond the domain in the places her students live, work, and carry on making micro-environmental decisions like those modelled for them on the domain in their years here.]

Liza: please do not mis-understand me here. This is not an attack upon you, for you seem to me to be the exception that proves the general observation I make here--but then I do not expect you to come back and tell me how nice you think the campus looks. The nice looks have been bought at an ecological/environmental cost. We must havesome grass, even do some spraying. I think the Physical Plant Services people who supervise these activities do their jobs conscientiously and competently; I am not attacking them. But why does a university, that has managed a 10,000 acre tract for 130 years, have to be criticized for failing to exercise responsible watershed management? Why is that 10,000 acre forest we tout so often as the essence of Arcadia--"a city set on a hill in a wood"--mostly composed of trash trees and is, with one small exception in Thumping Dick Cove, almost without value to me in explaining land-people relations in the South? Why in the name of the Lord of Creation should this institution at this point in the 20th century have yet to discover silt fences? Why isn't the domain as a tract of land, and the University as the manager of it, the example among examples in American higher education of responsible land management, recycling, resource management, and environmental education?

Why isn't that so? I think at this point our tradition, because of its romantic view of greeness, has betrayed us. Sewanee needs to learn how to see the land we live on and needs to learn how, in peace and responsibility, to live on it. [Read Psalm 65:9-13, KJV]

I am delighted with you and your work. I am grateful for your giving me the occasion to write and to put some of these things in a kind of order. Thank you for your patience in reading all this. I have enclosed drafts of some of my writings. I think you can see how some of my ideas began to form and the the subsequent shape they have taken. Read "Lanes" if nothing else. You will have to skip up and down a bit in the "Reflections" draft.

I think what Sewanee needs now--and where I think the SEN can help a lot--is an environmental policy. I think this policy needs to be formulated according to the parameters I suggest in the attached document [see 341 Appendices, "Policy"], and then it needs to be adopted so as to have the same status as our lease, housing, drug, or personnel policies: that is, it should become a specific administrative policy guideline [not a set of rules and regulations] for how we view, educate about, and ultimately manage this land treasure we hold.

SMITH

II.

Liza:

It was a delight to see you over the weekend and to learn face-to-face of you and Gilmer. That is a matter of much delight as well. Also, I got the brochure. It is an attractive piece. Your note, particularly the query ["Does the University recycle?"]from Virginia Otley, prompts me to write. I feel that I should caution you about me and my ideas.

Let's begin this way: If Virginia asked me that question, I would have replied, "Unfortunately, yes." Now what does that mean? Does it mean that I am some anti-environmental, closet Quayleite supporting corporate abuse? That I am indifferent to the problem of waste? No. It doesn't mean any of those things. It does mean that I do not think the University is very environmentally aware, that it has not done much in the way of systematic thinking about the relation between its institutional/corporate character and its local environment nor about the relation between its Statement of Purpose and curriculum and the environment. [Having a department of natural resources doesn't, in this case, count--George Ramseur and Harry Yeatman have probably influenced more students and the general public more on environmental issues than all the rest of us put together.] In many ways, in my view, the life of the university--as it is practised in the management of the Domain, in its marketing of liberal education to a narrow economic niche, and in its tolerance for a now-defunct set of social values which continue to set the social [and derivatively the ethical] agenda not only of out-of-class life but of the university's vision of itself and what it is about--is out of touch with its own enviromental disorder, with the global environmental crisis and our relation to it, and it is out of touch with the kinds of changes in the lives of its graduates that have already begun to shift the character of alumni concern away from the traditional socializing: to wit--the Sewanee Environmental Network, the several emerging women's caucuses that have organized to work for change in the representation of women in the life of the university, the powerful shift of religious interest in the direction of "pentecostal-type" expressions. Recycling enables the University and its students to think they really are doing something good for the environment when in fact they fail to see the larger systems and global causes of environmental problems which our "commitment to recycling" has not touched at all--but which we are unable to recognize because by recylcing we think we are doing the very thing we are unable to see we are not doing.

Does the University recycle? Have you noticed how the material you get from Public Relations has that neat little "Printed on Recycled Paper" image on it? Do we now have bins in our offices for excess/waste xerox paper? Yes. At the SPO? Yes. But consider this: with the advent of the Apple/Macintosh system--which ought to be a means of reducing paper usage--paper usage has skyrocketed [truly exponential growth in the use of paper]. Is the xerox paper recycled? Yes, much of it. Does that make it ok? NO. NO. NO. With the introduction of the Macintoshes, the capacity of students to blitz the SPO with announcement is staggering--literally--for the workmen who have to haul off the barrels of waste generated each week in the SPO. Some days the SPO floor is dangerous because it is a tile floor and it is covered in a carpet of SPO notices that students neither bother to read nor to drop in one of the recycling bins--they just rake the stuff out of their box, save their good mail and let the rest fall to the floor. We introduced Macintosh, a campus-wide computer network [Angel Net], and an integrated campus phone system--but did we offset paper consumption by installing easy access terminals in the hallways to check the daily calendar? No. The daily/weekly calendar is printed and stuffed in the SPO boxes. [There is a public user information service, but it functions like a reference book, not like a daily newspaper.] Did we, in introducting this technology, supply the additional technology for campus wide E-mail? No. We have an E-mail system, but it is mostly administrative & faculty. In short, we did not approach nor use the new technology as a way of reducing paper usage, but as a way of facilitating printing of what we write. Did we invest enough money in the hardware so that students can do more and more assignments that are paper free? No. We do not yet have a single classroom [including the computer lab] that is designed for paper free instruction; we are about to turn the corner on the 21st Century and our faculty is still discussing the way to make better use of chalkboards, the merits of whiteboards vs. chalkboards, etc. I think I am the only person concerned to have a HUMANITIES-located, fully networked, integrated media classroom--paper free--for instruction. [Jesus Christ! I am a religion teacher. Where are the rest of these people when it comes to computer technology??] Committed as I am to reduction of paper use, it is still hard to manage that on this campus. [And why are not you and I exchanging all of this over BITNET or COMPUSERVE? Why is it not yet as easy for me to use a modem as it is to use a printer?--think this: Why not a Sewanee electronic bulletin board so we can access, from Wytheville and Seattle and New York, all manner of current university information--from the electronic SEN newsletter to copies of syllabi to current calendars, lectures, articles by profs, etc.?? Space and place mean nothing--network is everything. Why not use the networks to keep Sewanee together? Think about Gore's support for national fiber-optic information highways.]

Consider this: we still have classes where the students are required to subscribe to a newspaper--WSJ or NYT. This makes a mockery of any commitment to recycling. But, you say, can't those newspapers be recycled, aren't they recycled? Yes, yes. That is the problem. Those newspapers should not be printed or purchased; certainly students should not be encouraged to buy them. The future, the environmental future, does not belong to newspapers--nor to magazines. [Gilmer: The Purple is a crime against nature! Why not a paper-free Purple published entirely on the campus network?]

Understand where I am coming from here [and see relevant passages in the enviromental Journal]--RECYCLING IS THE PROBLEM, NOT THE SOLUTION.

Do we have recycling in the dorms? Yes. Two students--Tim Wahlers and Julia Sibley--put together the original program. [These two students were real stars in their concern for the community nature of this place, and they were religion majors.] They needed a faculty sponsor to get student government funding. I agreed to be faculty sponsor--but I stated my strong reservations about recycling. The group Waste Not was created and "funded". In the next year, Waste Not began dorm recycling: cardboard boxes in the stairwells: "Paper" "Bottles" "Cans"--"Please Recycle". There was paper collected. University workers--that is, the economic bottom of the scale in the University--collected the cans; their can collection worked better than anything. By the middle of the first year, the boxes were trashbins. Roaches had infected the dorms and safety had become a problem. After two dormitory hallway fires, I, acting as fire marshal, banned all containers in the hallways and stairwells. A committee was formed to study the problem, new collection bins were selected, and I mapped each dorm to locate the bins in a safe place. Now there is a moderately well-functioning program working in the dorms that is coordinated with office recycling programs, and it is largely staffed by student volunteers and the university supports it by designating custodians time and vehicles to move the recyclables to the recycling center. I was part of this. I assisted it, and I am--as I have told every person I have worked with--opposed to it.

I am opposed to it for two reasons: first, all recycling is bad--immoral--economics. It presupposes and validates a culture of waste and asks volunteers to subscribe the cost of the external dis-economies of the corporations that generate the waste and reap the profits. Second, all recycling is psychologically deceptive--it makes people think that they are doing something good, when in fact they are simply perpetuating the system that causes the need for recycling in the first place. The point is not whether recycling works, not whether a community can attain a 50% or 75% recycling rate, not whether some people of very good intent are into recycling. Recycling is not the point. Waste is the point. I know that the "in" expression is "Reduce, Re-use, Recycle", but the commercial/production agenda of the developed world is not oriented to reduction. It is oriented to production--which means that re-use and recycle are the only means for dealing with corporate ruin of resources. Recycling mentality then merely extends, endorses, perpetuates that corporate culture of ruin and exploitation. The only reason we need to deal with the problem of aluminum cans in our dormitories is that we allow them there in the first place--in fact, by administrative consent, encourage them to be there even to the point of compromising the fire safety of certain dorms in order to make space for private vendors to install vending machines. Why?

It is time for America, for the university, to move morally beyond its endorsement of and abetting of the cola addiction of America. Liza, I am not naive. I know that when I speak of cola addiction, people usually think that I am simply a nutty professor and they smile or laugh. It is the nature of the systems/conceptual disorder of our culture of acquistion that it is very difficult--in a consumer society driven by production-consumption-advertising--to raise consciousness about things that radically challenge our way of life. Things such as newspapers, mail, containers. But we MUST re-think all these things, and we must stop giving in to the prevailing conditions. Twenty-five years ago, no one would have thought that we could envision a smoke-free America. We are not there yet, but we now have smoke free flights, smoke-free malls in some cities, smoke free offices, etc. It is possible to imagine that we will have no newspapers, a national "thing" deposit system, even that we will produce a generation of children who are not cola addicted. [The health & social costs recovered if we could wean Americans from colas, cigarettes, candy, and alcohol would fund both all our schools and all the environmental cleaning up we would ever need to do.] [Think also of this: in some Latin American areas, the social forms associated with the drinking of cola beverages--specifically Coca Cola--lead to levels of cola consumption which displace more than half of the monetary (non-produce) income of the village/town males each year. In the face of the poverty of these villages, the advertizing that has led to their social addiction to colas is runious. The cola industry is as bad as the tobacco industry. Why should we abet it by making it more economical for them to acquire beverage containers while assuming the cost of waste management for them ourselves?]

Think new thoughts.

Yes, Virginia, Sewanee is into recycling--and it spends more money in staff salaries cleaning up the campus--where these Sewanee students have thrown their trash under every bush and on every lawn and in every parking lot and in every hall way--than it spends on recycling. Sewanee student--love them as I do--are a trashy lot, because they come from an indulgent culture of trash: they mirror the values of the society that produced them. A few years ago, I was on a consulting visit to another college to evaluate its philosophy and religion programs. This college, like Sewanee, had a large campus [thousands of acres], but unlike Sewanee was not so academically sound nor so well funded. I was on their campus for several days and on one day was driven--at my request--over the whole campus: every street, backroad, and fire lane. As we drove, I kept a running tally of the pieces of trash--some paper, some cans--that I saw. I counted--on a tract twice the size of Sewanee's 10,000 acres--29 pieces of trash. When I got back to Sewanee, I began to make the same survey, but quickly gave it up. I found over half that many pieces of trash on the site of Fulford Hall, then the residence of the Vice-Chancellor. Now, I am sure that that campus I visited had more than 29 pieces of trash on it; I am equally sure that I have never been on another quality campus that has as much trash on it as Sewanee. You don't see much of it--that is because we now have regular grounds crew rotations early in the mornings, including weekends, to pick it up so you won't have to see it [we both hide the trash from ourselves as well as the costs of our endorsement of the American beverage packaging industry--this is why I am opposed to and will not any longer support or participate in "clean-ups" along the roadside].

Last Mardi Gras season, I was driving past Elliott Dorm. I saw two girls dressed up and loading their car to leave for New Orleans. As they put their trip clothes in the back seat of their BMW, they removed the contents of two wasted six packs--and simply threw them on to the front lawn of Elliott. These were not "Tennessee Trash"--they were Sewanee's prettiest and they gave no mind whatever to disposing of their trash right on to the lawn--completely confident as they well could be that it would be picked up by their indulgent university. Were these women typical? No. Not at all. Most students don't trash--at least not quite that way, but if you drive the campus early on weekend mornings, you will find more trash here than I have ever seen on another campus. [Why don't we have a universal--American--beverage container that is standardized across the nation--not the damn stupid Sierra cup--but a real workable container recognized by all bulk beverage dispensing businesses, a kind of Hardee's special mug, but one that is national? Why don't we--instead of using so many plastic cups and cans--[if we are going to have kegs] have a Sewanee cup given to all students when they enter to be used at Gailor, parties, etc.?] Recycling will never cure a culture that thinks it is alright to waste and trash in the first place. Sewanee in this regard is simply as American as--well, a coke can.

What does all of this come to? Only this. I think I can say that I am a concerned environmentalist, but I must also say that my concern is seldom symmetric with the current popular causes. When I talk to you or my students, you may like some of my ideas and my talk, but the actions that arise from those ideas are not always what current environmentalists expect or assume. I am at the point where I am less and less attracted to lost causes whether traditional or contemporary--and I think many environmental causes--especially recycling--are lost causes. I am almost daily worrying the limits of my mind to reconcile my upbringing with my vision of the future and to think in effective ways about the nature of our global crisis and of effective measures that might be taken. Right now, my mind is such that I do not think many of the environmental "actions" are anything but delusions in the face of our problems. [Buying and setting aside land-as per the land trust--is about the only environmental action that makes sense to me right now.]

Sometimes, when I say things like this, my students accuse me of "not wanting to try" or "giving up" or of "dispairing". I accept none of those criticisms. America needs to know that even if recycling works, it doesn't work. I am not being cynical if I recognize that and try to envision something beyond it. Nor do I think any longer that, well even if it doesn't solve the problems you are talking about, it doesn't do any harm and it might make people think about the environment. It does do harm. Most of our environmental concern arises from real, legitimate issues BUT is then expressed as nonsense. Then we begin to think the nonsense is helping when it is fatally delaying the responses we need to make, and it is fatally deceiving us from undertaking the critique of our culture necessary if that culture--in a transformed mode--is to survive. We need to educate our children, our students, our people differently--and that needed education is not about the benefits of recycling.

Several things are enclosed:

the environmental journal

a working draft of an essay on Battle Creek

my letter last summer to Julia Sibley who queried me on several issues

Real Indians and Smoky Mountains

Purple Butterflies

I hope you enjoy them. [all of this is made possible, of course, by the miracle of the Macintosh--and recycled paper.]

Please do not think you must respond. I am happy if you read the pieces eventually and think about them. Nor do I expect or even anticipate that you will agree with me so don't worry about that.

You may quote any of these things for the Newsletter. I only ask that you be careful to indicate context and intention--and just to recognize in literary terms that not all of what I write has the same value.

SMITH

III.

Liza

One more missive and I will have gotten most of what I want to tell you out of my system.

I did not attend the meeting of the land trust when it was organized in Sewanee that Sunday afternoon. I went fishing instead. I deliberately did not attend and I would like to indicate why. It connects with rivers, but it involves more than that. All the week before I had planned to come to the organizational meeting, but when the Messenger came out the Thursday before and I began to learn some of the local people involved, I decided not to attend. Most of those local people I know. Some of them for a very long time. Some of them are friends and some of them I have worked with on many public service projects here in Sewanee. With some of them I have shared experiences and knowledge of mountains and rivers, cliffs and caves, woods and birds. So why didn't I attend?

I didn't attend because my experience over the last decade or so has caused me more and more to reserve my affiliation with many of the interest groups I once supported or was interested in. I found that all too often--and I mean most of the time--when I was with many of these people that they often talked about or were concerned about the same issues I was concerned about--pollution of our rivers, waste of resources, denial of access to public resources by structures of power, and so on. But I also found out some other things. I found out that many of the people who were concerned about the environment were issues activists, that they had a very short list of approved people, issues, and actions--and, what troubled me the most, a very long list of disapproved people, issues, and actions. I found that I could express my concern about management of the university forest and we would agree, but if I let it slip that I had voted for Bush or owned a hand gun or opposed roadside cleanups, then the conversation became awkward, people looked away, and the immediate social order dissolved so as to un-include me. It was ok for me to agree with the problem of excess paving and its effect on runoff in Sewanee, but not for me to say that I thought it was fine for each student to have a car. It seems that if I was against more pavement or for better pavement management, I had also to be against cars. I could be for waste reduction, but since I am opposed to aluminum recycling--again, I was out in the cold. It seemed that if I were to be part of the "action" I had to agree in advance to an agenda and set of issues that I was not and am not prepared to agree to.

Let me give you an example. On balance I am opposed to clear cutting for chip mills, but not because they involve clearcutting, but because even with the so-called "best management practices" I don't trust the American fiber or timber industry not to abuse the land where they cut/chip, and I know that the greed driven industries that have ruined the south will ruin more of the south and that the result will be--immediately--more ruined waters from siltation and other runoff. At the same time, I accept the argument that most of the forest proposed for clearcutting/chipping is not better suited for anything else--since it has, like the Domain, like most of Tennessee, like most of the original deciduous forest of the South, already been destroyed by multiple high grade cuttings that have left millions of acres of waste trees that take up enough sunlight in the canopy to make what children and fools think is a forest but that is not now and never will be healthy, and in any case in no way resembles the original form or mix of the forests that once grew in this region. Clear cutting and chipping--particularly on large areas of the Domain--[this is the vilest heresy] is the only thing that will restore a natural forest to this area--but it will require a natural reforestation and succession [the area cleared cannot be exclusively managed for poplar and locust except where that is the natural succession on the site]--as would have taken place after a large forest fire--and it must totally exclude all intrustive, alien softwoods, and it will take approximately 100 to 150 years to bear fruit. Clearcutting and chipping will not be the worst thing that ever happened to the Domain or the South or Tennessee; the worst thing that ever happened has already happened--it was called white settlement. It destroyed a native people, it ruined and made extinct several species of game animals, it wasted the remaining game, ruined the land and soils, and destroyed the world's last remaining upland deciduous forest. We have come to accept it as perfectly normal only because we do not understand what was here before.

Let Gilbert Imlay, c.1792, say it: "The land on the waters of Tenasee and Cumberland rivers is generally well timbered. In some places there are glades of rich land without timber; but these are not frequent nor large. The general growth is poplar, hickory, black-walnut, buck-eye, or the horse-chestnut, sycamore, locust, and sugar-maple. The under growth, in many places, is cane 15 or 20 feet high, so close together, as to exclude all other plants; where the cane does not abound, we find red-bud, wild-plum, spice-wood, red and white mulberry, gensang, Virginia and Seneca snake-root, angelica, sweet anise, ginger, and wild-hops. The glades are covered with clover, wild-rye, buffalo-grass, and pea vine. On the hills, at the heads of rivers, we find stately red cedars; many of these trees are four feet in diameter, and forty feet clear of limbs. In those hills there is abundance of iron-ore, lead-ore, and coals. Copperas and alum fit for use have been gathered in caves near Nashville." Topographical Description of North America (London, 1797), p. 41. Even when we allow for the surveyor's exaggeration, Imlay is describing a world none of us have ever seen. I have never seen a red cedar as he describes. I don't think he was exaggerating, however. Consider a more recent account from eastern Kentucky as given in Caudill's Night Comes to the Cumberlands. Caudill cites one deed that had the following terms: "that for and in consideration of the sum of $20,000, the grantor hereby bargains, sells, grants, and conveys unto the grantee 40,000 poplar and whiteoak trees, each of said trees to measure not less than 30 inches in diameter under the bark, stump high, measuring three feet above the ground, without fire damage or blemish..." [Caudill also recounts a whiteoak tree that was cut and sawed square for shipment to England in 1912 that was 36 inches on the side and 42 feet long. (pp. 63-64)] There are very few whiteoak trees of this description on the domain--the only ones in fact are on the Quad. All the rest have been cut--decades ago. The "nature" in this case we are trying to preserve is rather analagous to trying to preserve an old garbage dump because the trees that are left are exactly analagous to garbage: they are left behind because they are waste trees that no one wanted. Though they have in the intervening half-century acquired some value, we are fools to pretend that they somehow represent "nature" in general nor especially that they somehow represent something worthy of preservation because they are a last remnant of an old forest not yet destroyed by development. The only reason I can think of not to cut them and start over is that we could never do it right so it is best to leave it alone--though we seem to have trouble doing even that.

I support the concept of a land trust for the Sewanee area, not so much for the quality of the forest it will preserve, but because it will put land out of the reach of cutting and thereby protect the critical watershed areas I am interested in. Even waste trees of the wrong type have roots and if left alone can protect hills, soils, drainages, and contribute to quality waters. Sewanee sits astride three watersheds I study: the Elk, Battle Creek, and Crow Creek. During this past summer a watershed/water quality controversy arose that you may be familiar with because it involved some of the people who are in the land trust group. One day in the Sewanee Messenger there was a planted front page story on the Tracy City project to dam Fiery Gizzard Creek. The story had been submitted by the SOCM crowd and it took me a while to figure out that they were talking about a dam on the creek north of the Tracy City highway; their rhetoric in the article made it seem as if the creek was about to be dammed in the gorge itself. In the weeks that followed there was additional material in the messenger--a letter from a Tracy City resident, from local friends of Fiery Gizzard, and from a person involved in the survey of Tracy City's water supply. I don't think I exaggerate to say that the SOCM position was that building the dam would be not only unnecessary [which I agree] but an enviromental disaster, albeit on a small scale. Here was another issue requiring action: it seemed clear that if one was to be in conversation with SOCM, there was only one position that was tenable--you had to be opposed to the dam.

On general principles, I am opposed to all dams. I certainly do not want to see this one built, but if it is built, it probably will do as much good as harm. Why? Most of the people who get wrought up about Fiery Gizzard Creek know it from the upper middle end. That is, they don't pay much attention to it until it passes the highway and falls off the bluff. The Gizzard falls and surrounding natural area is a gem and should be protected. I agree. But what about the quality of the total watershed from end to end? What about the strip mines on the upper end? Did the people who oppose the dam raise the issue of those mines--or of the effects of runoff and siltation on the creek? Did they indicate in their opposition to the dam that the dam would virtually stop siltation in the lower stream course? No. All Dams Are Bad. If you see a good in a dam, you are bad. These enthusiasts hue and cry to save Fiery Gizzard, but the dam may actually be an element in saving it--at least with respect to water quality downstream. Did they raise the issue of siltation? No. All dams are bad. Did they consider the impact of septic tanks in the Fiery Gizzard Estates now developing south of Tracy City and the fact that this runoff will negatively impact the creek as much as the dam? No. Did SOCM go into the lower creek after the 1991 flood and look at the effects of poverty on trash dispersal along the stream? No. The dam is a good image issue. Real water quality is a much more complex issue. SOCM has many good people, and they know much that needs to be known, but they are, in my opinion, no more balanced in their approach to complex issues than the other sides they are always lining up against. Fiery Gizzard is one of three large tributaries of Battle Creek. The others are the upper Battle Creek drainage itself and Sweetens Creek. Did the land trust people talk about the relation between the Ladd Cove drainage of Battle Creek and the Domain--and the problem with the dam there? Why not? SOCM has come out against the Fiery Gizzard dam. Have they taken an equally active role for the residents of Ladd Cove? Now I don't want to blame SOCM. The issues here exceed even their range of interest. My point is that these issues are complex, they are connected across large areas, and they will not be resolved by taking "action". At the very least, environmental action groups need the honesty of accepting and indicating the complexity of the problems that confront us.

A few weeks ago I was talking to a friend and fellow flyfisherman in Chattanooga who is active in Trout Unlimited (in some ways I regard him as one of the leading and most involved environmentalists in Chattanooga). He had recently pulled out of the movement against the woodchip mills--not because he wants the mills, not because he did not recognize the damage likely to be done by them--no. He pulled out because he said he no longer trusted the environmentalists he had to work with any more than he did the woodchip companies. I could understand his feeling. It was the way I began to feel years ago as my environmental conscience quickened and as I found it more and more difficult to find people to talk to who did not expect me to endorse their issues agendas. [You will see some of this frustration articulated in the journal.]

So what I have come to is this: I will write--but generally not for magazines--only for my students, friends, and books. [There are zillions of tons of magazines in landfills--but very few books. In my dump surveys, I almost never find books. Books are still taken seriously; magazines and newspapers are not.] I will teach. But I will not go to meetings, sign simple-minded petitions, or recycle without protest. I will support the land trust, contribute to it when I can, but I won't act on issues. One of the people involved in the Fiery Gizzard discussion was my friend, Herman Bagenstoss, of Tracy City. He is pro-dam, anti-SOCM. I am anti-dam [really], but pro-Herman. Will he benefit because he owns property adjacent to the pond to be created by the dam? Yes. Does he want to destroy Fiery Gizzard? I don't think so. Herman is the only person I can talk to about the lower and upper courses of these streams. Am I expected to believe that a man that still talks about a 7# rainbow trout he caught in Fiery Gizzard Creek wants to destroy it because he is pro-dam? I don't believe it. I don't happen to agree with him on this, but neither do I agree with SOCM. Our problem is not the dam. Our problem is the issues oriented disjunction of our society that has made it impossible for these good people to work together--whether on the quality of Fiery Gizzard or the Domain or the Hiwassee or any other environmental problem.

I am beyond issues. That's me. I don't know where I am going, but I have some strong ideas about where I am not going. I'll write. I'll listen. We can talk.

SMITH

IV.

Liza (#IV, I think):

I wrote somewhere else that to be is finally to belong. All being is the incarnation of mutual otherness we call community. [Read Buber's I and Thou; it is the one! piece of theology I read] I can make community with them. Mono-communities are not communities--not in faculties or classrooms or neighborhoods. Good communities--and good community organizations--survive their diversity; in fact, become good communities doing all kinds of new, different, needed things because of their diversity which is a resource for their creativity. Diversity is energy which can be expressed as friction or creation--or friction and creation. The trick/wisdom is to find ways to use the heat of friction to fuel creation and not burn it down. When we work with people, we are playing with fire; sometimes we get burned; sometimes we make smores and sing songs. What is already significant about SEN/Land Trust is that it exists, not that we all agree. We don't want Sewanee or UofS or SEN to be only one thing for one group of people. You have a great heart and vision and you taught me and I learned with joy. Thank you. As I read, I kept having this mix of christmas + cummings (ee) echoes. The joy, peace, love--good news--of christmas and all of cummings patient, loving, wonder at the creation with all its warts and weals. [cummings was a great environmentalist, but fortunately is not seen as such and continues to have good influence all over the place: do you remember "I thank you god for most this amazing day and for the leaping greenly spirits of trees...?"].

Your exerpting is fine. I would leave in the plankton/grazers passage. I want people to be kept thinking about the food chain at its most obscure level.

Resist the temptation to make too much of me. I write and talk a lot and take up a lot of space, but the other voices need to sing too.

peace

you and gilmer make babies soon. I may just get to teach them before I retire.

smith

V.

Liza:

I don't quite know where I am, but part of me at least is in Sewanee. I am here for the duration--today we just finished three weeks of Humanities workshop, Sunday we begin Summer School, and then Summer Seminar. It has been a busy time lately. There has been a bit of sickness [Pat's mother and mine], and a lot of busy-work Sewanee foolishness [which I love nonetheless] like Trustees and Commencement on back-to-back weekends. Also there is Alicia--now 8# @ 7 weeks. Miriam's child. Born on an infinite blue sky day of April 19th. Something of a distraction from fishing--although I have taken her in the truck to the river twice. She already likes the river. [I am typing with her on my left shoulder now--sliows down the typing a bit.]

I have been thinking about you all a lot. I am working on several pieces, but nothing has much shape yet. My new course, "Religious Ecology" [or some such title] will be offered Spring '94. I am looking forward to it and reading all kinds of stuff old and new. I can't recall everything I have sent you, so there may be some duplicates in this batch. "Snag Ecology" is new. I wrote it after attending my first meeting of the Tennessee Rivers Assessment group with Doug C. That group is fun--although, as with any government or academic group, inclined to specialist reductions that fragments the whole and so does not fully understand what Polanyi called the "comprehensive entity" that is the gestalt of our integration of fragments into meaning.

mkv kvkovopjhviukm fuyvknb m kn bkkllkfvhu8folfy9 [Alicia's first mac-gram]

I am still seeking a voice or mode. The point is not to despair but to understand. But understanding is not a conclusion, interpretation, deduction. It arises from being-as-belonging. Insights arise dolphin-like and then disappear. We do not live by wit, but by grace and love.

It is so hard to know what to do anymore. When I was younger it all seemed much simpler: do a good turn daily. Be prepared. God and Country. A scout is trustworthy, loyal, helpful, friendly, courteous, kind, obedient, cheerful, thrifty, brave, clean, and reverent. I can still say it after forty years. I grew up in a small town of good scouts and girls who took home economics where they taught sewing and cooking. After the prom and graduation, you got married, got a job, rented an apartment, made babies. I had to look up Malaya and Thailand and Vietnam in an atlas; I had never heard of them. Now I can never forget them. My daddy worked in a paper mill. We never heard of or thought about pollution. Was the world more innocent back then? No. Were we naive? No. The focus was different. And the scale was different. In those days, good turns could make a difference--there was still less than one phone or car or radio per household and the butcher still delivered. Most of the produce was fresh and there were nine small markets in my childhood neighborhood. When there was a problem--trash, a family in need, a natural disaster--we all worked together: usually shoulder-to-shoulder and most of the work was heaving and shoving.

Today, there are six phones in my house, I am listening to Alicia on a "baby beeper" in another room from me, there are three radios in my truck and when something happens I may be coordinating up to 20 different public emergency agencies on 12 different channels. Now I don't hold firehoses or climb ladders; more often than not, I am on the radio with an EPA rep about whether we can use water on an oil leak without flushing it into a watershed. Today the "volunteers" on any project are sometimes but frequently not neighbors--they may as often be out-of-state people who are networked by a common interest rather than a common life. And today whenever we work shoulder-to-shoulder, my best management sense tells me we are doing something wrong.

Did the world become evil? No. At some point between 1960 and 1980 it just reached a critical mass of complexity that was no longer amenable to local effort. Most of us, however, carry on as if boy scout morality and dutiful girls in cooking classes will see us through. They won't. Knowing that they won't is not, however, a cause for despair nor especially is it a conclusion arrived at on the basis of cynicism. The hardest thing I have to do is to "decry" the folly of good causes without giving my students cause to quit or collapse into despair. There is much to decry; we must never despair. All our projects are doomed. The transformation of the world will not cease. At 36 or 48 billion people nothing of the world you or I know will remain. The entire globe including Antarctia will look like Belgium, Tokoyo, or Mexico City. The rainforest along with the Siberian taiga will be gone. There will be no open spaces, no free flowing streams; little or no grass. We must prepare now for that world as we must prepare now for a world of 12 billion which will happen in your lifetime. Alicia will bear children in a very different Tennessee from the one I live in.

In the end, we must believe in each other not in our projects. Projects and causes are a rage against community, denying what they would affirm, keeping us from what we must be and do. In knowing all our projects are doomed, I find a very great freedom. Bonhoffer said we were a world come of age and must seek to formulate a "religionless" Christianity, a new way of Christ free of dogma, historicism, bad faith. If we are also come of age ecologically, we must formulate a causeless environmentalism--an ecology that begins as human ecology and studies economics and ethics and sociology before it ever looks at a stream or landfill. The time has come for us to look beyond the environment to a global suburb that will house and feed all people. No environmental program--no cause--will ever work as long as there is a society where some people are rich enough to throw their cans out the window and some people are poor enough to want them to. All [I have said this before]--ALL--environmental problems are the direct product of two interwoven things: greed and need.

Conservation begins with two bullets--one for the surplus and one for the liberal; environmentalism begins with two bullets--one for the rich and one for the environmentalist.

You need despair only when you cease to believe that we can live in peace on the earth, feed, clothe, heal, and shelter all people. We can do it. We can do it. If we had spent the hundreds of trillions of dollars we spent on the arms race from 1940 to 1990, we could have had food for all, universal education, universal--global--healthcare-----and we could have done it on a sustainable yield basis with appropriate infrastructure, technology and low environmental impact. Tobacco is a $47 BILLION per year industry--exclusive of the related costs of cancer, air filtration, fires: 1000 people die in the US every day from health problems related to smoking: we are looking at a national madness that consumes capital in excess of $100 billion per year. There is nothing you or I or any Somali or Russian could desire for health or the environment that could not be purchased with that kind of money. When we add alcohol and its effects to those of war and tobacco, the economic scale is stunning. One year's cost of war, alchohol, tobacco, would fund every thing the enviromental movement has attempted or fought for in this century. The money was there; it is there. I do not despair because I believe in our capacity to manage for a common good, but such management means a great re-direction in national priorities.

Two interesting comments at the Summer Seminar (I) last week: Bran introduced me as a "naturalist"--I was honored to be so designated; a participant [who did not like what I had to say about farmers and soil management] accused me of thinking as I did because I was a professor! I wonder what he had expected.

I am enclosing several pieces--for your enjoyment, etc. The "God and the Land" piece is in process and will be re-worked again. [The footnote apparatus is [as you can see] a mess.] A couple of them I may have sent before; I suppose I should keep track, but I don't.

SMITH

VI.

Dear Liza, et alia:

"Leases taken of every available locality"

Curious how so many things come together at once. I spent yesterday on the computer working on a part of my essay about the natural history of Abbo's Alley, musing from time to time on SEN and whether I had missed the last newsletter, and in my writing on Abbo's Alley I was re-reading the Proceedings of the Board of Trustees for 1882-89. And today the Newsletter arrived! "Network News" brought the problems of development on the Domain into focus yet again for me.

Like Bran Potter, I have been involved in a variety of ways with the general issue of Domain land use as well as with several specific issues such as TVA right of way clearance, landfill and garbage disposal, cleanups, and recycling. I served on committees of the original [and abortive] land use/campus plan of the eighties; and served both on the steering committee and the outdoor recreation committee of the most recent land use study. In addition, I learned much of my local ecology from the classes and labs of people like George Ramseur, Harry Yeatman, and Henry Smith. These teachers were my first mentors in the natural history and ecology of the Cumberland Plateau.

Over nearly twenty-five years, I have seen a lot change around Sewanee. When I first came to the Domain, the forest cover of the central campus was much more dense than it now is--on the golf course one could hardly see from fairway to fairway and seldom did balls go so far astray as to be played from the next fairway over. [Today, of course, Manigault Park and the Quad are far more sunny--with lawns in constant need of mowing--and the fairway margins of the golf course now hold only token trees where once were dense rows.] In the late 60's most of the lesser streets and roads were unpaved and the only curbing was along University Avenue. The only dorm with a paved parking lot was Courts. Up through the 1980's, most leaf gathering was done with rakes and tarps, not with power blowers and monster vacuums. It was a more ragged [and quieter!] world and the edges were not neatly trimmed.

Sewanee entered the 1990's striving to be neat and clean even while the sentiments of many Americans and some alums were turning against the environmentally devastating aesthetic of neatness in lawns and walkways. [See Redesigning the American Lawn ] Once again, it seemed as if we were caught at cross purposes in our own good intentions. Proud and growing, we wanted Sewanee to be pretty, yet we knew something was beginning to be wrong in Arcadia, in the city set in a wood on a hill. The wood frankly was not well. Too many of our trees were lost. Years of high-grading left us a poor and weakened forest excessively vulnerable to natural events like the ice storm of 1985. Worse though, our seventy-five year obsession with mowing had left us--in the core campus, at least--with an inverted bell curve of young/old tree distribution: a lot of recently planted young trees standing under 250 year-old oaks about to die. Soon the old trees of the Quad and its contiguous areas will die, the canopy will open further, more grass will need to be mowed while we wait five decades for those saplings to reach young middle age. Our spate of mowing-without-planting killed the middle of the curve, and Sewanee folks will pay for it for two or three generations yet to come.

We lately discovered we are also choked with cars and face the absurdity not only of having 70+% of our students maintaining at least one car apiece on campus, but in actually using those cars to drive from Johnson Dorm to Walsh Hall; from Cleveland Dorm to the Chapel. I suppose I would not have minded the cars and the curbs and the paving so much if we had ever given any attention to the erosive and polluting impact of runoff. Where does the storm water go that flushes our parking lot drippings? Not once in my eleven years on the Lease Committee nor in my work on several land use committees did I ever find this issue addressed.

And as the Domain became more attractive to retirees, affluent alums, and friends of Sewanee fleeing the dysfunctional cities, the Domain fell under the irreversible spiral of rising property values and static faculty salaries that began the core/periphery transformation of Sewanee like that at most every other college across the country. So great was the interest that available leaseholds could not keep up with demand and the new word we quickly learned was "development". This was the operative, driving concept of the last land use study. We were told that if we did not plan for it, it would happen anyway without planning. We were told that we needed "affordable housing" which seemed as much a way of trying to justify housing market expansion in terms of the needs of lower income families as it was a reflection of real need. The realtor-driven expansionist rhetoric led to a fatal acquiesence of university and community alike in the inevitability of development.

Much evidence of the inevitable was already around us. Cliff Tops, Deep Woods and Jump Off had already begun development supported in part by the [now] highly questionable extension of water services to areas where the capital costs of installation quickly exceeded the economic carrying capacity. The ecologic question of carrying capacity--i.e., of the capacity of the environment to supply water and its capacity to absorb waste in relation to population load--was never asked: we were all quickly assured that there was plenty of water,"Sewanee didn't have a water problem", that the "system would pay for itself" for the "forseeable future." Rattlesnake Springs was developed, and then Sherwood Estates, then Laurel Brae. All these folks wanted fire, police, and EMS protection--along with other quasi-municipal amenities; they wanted, even expected and demanded these services, yet did not participate in the lease fee system that supported the cost of such services. In town, Oak Hill developed and was quickly filled, followed by Carpenter Circle. The dynamic of escalating housing costs, outside buyers, lagging faculty salaries, and University administrative support for development intensified.

Environmental/ecological questions about development have notably conspicuous by their absence. In reference to the steadily expanding numbers of student cars, more than one administrator had said: "Sewanee has plenty of land, we can build parking lots." Laurel Brae was a more difficult case. Strong pressure from the community of realtors, an alumnus, and internally from within the administration was applied to the members of the Lease Committee and to the University Forester to approve a new road which would bisect a largely unbroken tract of University woodland instead of utilizing a portion of an existing roadway which would leave the forest tract intact. Despite the detailing of environmental objections, a single individual executed the contract for easement and the road was built. We were told that "developers have rights too." Bill Davis and I had never argued against the development, only the location of the access road, but our position was construed as "unreasonable" and our environmental concerns dismissed as without warrant by persons having no knowledge whatsoever of the environmental issues.

Sewanee approaches the end of the Twentieth Century poised for greater expansion and development than it has seen since the transition from log to stone buildings a hundred years ago. Our national image apparently requires it and, more tellingly, market and demographic forces both internal and intrinsic to Sewanee as well as external pressures compel this development. Educational and support programs are growing and along with them professional and support personnel are expanding while at the same time enrollments in both the College and School of Theology are rising. Faculty housing remains in short supply and seminary student housing is at a near-crisis stage. Already market pressures and other forces are driving faculty away from the core campus residential zone, and faculty along with some students have begun to occupy residences not only in Monteagle but also in the valley, including Cowan and Winchester and beyond. For about a decade we have seen the slow emergence of a group of commuters in the Sewanee area--people living in Sewanee, Midway, Jump Off, etc.--who commute each day from the mountain to work or schooling in places such as Chattanooga, Huntsville, McMinnville, Smyrna, and Nashville. Recently a new twist has begun to develop in this commuting pattern: Sewanee full-time faculty living off the mountain who now commute to Sewanee to teach their classes.

Since 1969 extended tracts of woodland have been cleared along the highway to Monteagle, along the Jump Off Road to the crest of the plateau above South Pittsburg, and the slow sprawl of housing--and the demand for infrastructure--continues to grow all around the Domain. The Sewanee Summit/Cedar Mountain development located just below the rim of the plateau beyond the University boundary at the end of the Breakfield Road continues to pressure the University for a road connection. [A water line has already been extended through the fire lanes to supply this development.] The eventual building of the Nissan plant [to be located between the foot of Lands End Ridge and the outskirts of Decherd] and the proposed Lake Cheston area development will put almost irresistable pressure upon the University to approve a road connection from the Breakfield Road to Sewanee Summit. The joining of these two areas by continuous roadway will not only cause the university the loss of control of access to the forest, but will impel continuing housing development between Lake Cheston and Sewanee Summit.

Unfortunately so much of what is now happening is exactly what the Founders' envisioned and desired when the land of the Domain was acquired. Consider the 1886 comments of George R. Fairbanks:

The founders of the University, those grand, wise and sagacious men, Bishops Polk, Otey, Elliott, Cobbs, Green and others, had in their minds a definite plan and system. The securing of a domain of ten thousand acres was the foundation of their plans. They wished room enough upon which to build their University buidlings without restriction as to the area to be occupied. They set apart a campus of one thousand acres as a Reserve for this purpose. This Reserve was destined primarily for the University buildings, Professors' houses, and boarding houses connected therewith. Outside of the Reserve, the domain was expected to be occupied by Church families. Distance was not regarded, because the class of residents who would be expected to erect residences for summer homes necessarily belonged to the same class who always, at their homes, provide themselves with conveyances for use and pleasure. It was anticipated "that a time not distant would come," when, in the language of Bishop elliott, "this whole plateau would be covered over with villas and cottages and watering places, and would teem with the most refined society of the South and West."

They believed that the domain of the University, if managed with a prudent forecast, would create at no distant day a secure endowment, ever increasing in value; leases taken of every available locality, and a large and refined society, brought together here from all parts of the South, homogenous in sentiment, centering around these halls of learning, interested in and advancing this great work.

It was not the purpose to build up a town, but a large sylvan population, where every home should be surrounded with the leafy shades of the primeval forests, mingling the wildness of nature with the improvements of man, and placed upon wooded knolls, with meandering paths upon their gentle slopes, or on bold summits presenting distant scenes of unsurpassed beauty, rich valleys and a boundless horizon stretching far away into purple hued cloudlands, whre clouds and sky are undistinguishable.

They realized the advantages which this magnificent plateau presented for such a development. Its absolute healthfulness, its pure freestone water supply, its admirable building stone,its accessibility by railway and common roads, the abundant region surrounding it, "with milk and honey blessed," as well as everything needful at moderate cost.[2]

Unfortunately also, the University has now managed to put into place a comprehensive land use plan without at the same time setting or approving any environmental policy by which to assess, approve, or monitor the development of its Domain. We should note carefully: the land use plan is a plan for the use of land; it is not an environmental policy. It is a development plan, not an environmental plan. I participated in the formulation of the land use plan because I believed it was needed to guide--not determine in advance--the developmental decisions which would face the University in the 1990's and beyond. As a general developmental plan, it is a good plan--BUT it is not an environmental policy or plan and it does not insure that those things which may become either inevitable or desirable will be achieved in ways that are environmentally sound or ecologically wise. As a planning instrument, it possesses good characteristics--it is systematic, comprehensive, flexible, detailed. According to this plan, good arguments can be developed by the administration for the development of the Lake Cheston perimeter for housing, but there is nothing in the plan--nor in any other existing university policy--that will protect Lake Cheston and the nearby sensitive ravine waterways from pollution by construction siltation or lawn nutrient runoff. There is nothing in the plan that evaluates the factors of biological diversity or habitat diversity and their intrinsic value or their value to the educational program of the University nor how these will be impacted by this or any other development.[3]

The land use plan is not the end but the beginning of the challenge we face. The university still must formulate a thorough, systematic, environmental plan to ground its land use plan. If it does not, we risk the certain consequences of environmentally unsound actions taken by people of good will who do not know what they are doing. I am in favor of the primary constituencies of Sewanee--composed much along the lines of the steering committee of the land use plan--coming together to formulate and recommend an environmental plan for the Domain.[4] I would see such an instrument, however, in strongly positive rather than negative terms: that is, it should guide us in how to accomplish what we want to do rather than serve as a perennial objection against doing anything at all. Ultimately, the environmental plan should grow out of the Statement of Purpose and give environmental form to the more general moral sensibility that Statement embodies. The environmental plan then would serve not only to protect us from short-term abuses and exploitations but would also serve as the basis of a positive model of envionmental management for the University. In conjunction with the land use plan the environmental plan could allow the University to assume a position of leadership in environmental education. I hope for the day when managers and university administrators and environmental scientists and landscape architects and developers will come here and see what we have done and be able to say with us: Ecce Quam Bonum. Behold How Good.

Gerald L. Smith

Sewanee

November 1993

[2]Fairbanks was a lay trustee from the Diocese of Florida. In 1886 he was the last remaining of the original or founding trustees. In the Proceeding of the Board of Trustees of that year his memorial, "The Plans of the Founders of the University" was inserted into the minutes. See University of the South Papers, Series B, No. 25. Proceedings of the Board of Trustees, 1886, pp. 61-70. The section quoted here is found at pages 66-67. Interestingly, for all his support of development, Fairbanks was much ahead of his time in his concern for the abuse of the forest cover and the loss of so many trees to careless cutting; he was especially sensitive to the effects of the loss of forest and understory cover upon water quality and the potential of the soil to sustain sanitary processes [which was the original reason for large 2 to 4 acre lease sites].

[3]There is, for instance, no existing inventory of plant or animal species that would indicate which animals are locally threatened or where they are located or what their habitat requirements are. Black bears have re-entered the Domain beyond Lake Cheston. Where do bears or cougars or ruffed grouse or the amphibians of the green-tree ponds fit in to our development plans? Where do nuisance animals such as beavers, skunks, coyotes, and timber rattlers fit into these plans. What is our management plan for the whitetail deer which has become a near-nuisance animal on the Domain? The large "conservation reserves" of the land use plan apparently protect big enough areas for some species, but is there a need for "micro-reserves" within the areas proposed for development?

[4]This plan must include a full assessment of Domain bio-diversity, wildlife inventory, and habitat assessment conducted in detail by professionals to serve as a base line for the future. Currently, for instance, there is no accurate inventory of whitetail numbers. It is ecologically unwise and, I believe morally wrong, to develop land and not ask what impact that development will have on wildlife, plants, and natural waters.