River Dreams -- and More

That was then....

River Dreams

This past Sunday for me was what you could call a lazy Sunday, even an old lady Sunday. I bought a print copy of the Sunday New York Times and spent most of the day on my front porch with the newspaper and a book, reading and dozing and dreaming, the book one I’d pulled from a shelf in the dark the night before. I’d gone to the shelf holding our river books, so I knew that anything my hand reached would be fine, and back in the light I saw it was Mark Twain. 

 

…The face of the water, in time, became a wonderful book—a book that was a dead language to the uneducated [steamboat] passenger, but which told its mind to me without reserve, delivering its most cherished secrets as clearly as if it uttered them with a voice. And it was not a book to be read once and thrown aside, for it had a new story to tell every day. Throughout the long twelve hundred miles there was never a page that was void of interest, never one that you could leave unread without loss, never one that you would want to skip, thinking you could find higher enjoyment in some other thing. There never was so wonderful a book written by man; never one whose interest was so absorbing, so unflagging, so sparklingly renewed with every perusal.

-      Life on the Mississippi

 

The Artist and I were always more river people than big lake people (much less ocean people). Our boat world was that of paddles and oars, maybe -- very occasionally -- a quiet trolling motor (borrowed), and more often a silent, nearly effortless floating and drifting glide downriver. Eyes constantly roving, alert for partially submerged obstructions in the stream, we were alive as well to roses and cardinal flowers on the banks, wild iris in the shallows, and turtles the size of garbage can lids sliding with a plop! into the water at our approach or a kingfisher swooping across our line of sight. The Paw Paw, the Little Rabbit, the Crystal, the Cedar, the Sucker – those were our rivers, small and intimate, each with its own personality. Although we read and re-read Harlan Hubbard’s Shantyboat and dreamed our way down the Ohio and Mississippi to New Orleans with Harlan and Anna, their riverside life at Payne Hollow was more our speed. No Mississippi for us!  

 

And of course there was the Artist’s own homemade houseboat on the Leland River for years…. Is it any wonder I found myself slipping a bookmark into the Mark Twain book now and then and setting it aside for my memories?

 

Eco-Us

When we are feeling oh-so-holier-than-X about our environmentally-friendly choices and passing negative on judgments on those whose decisions don't fully match up with our own, we might want to stop and think that we are not accurately measuring and comparing our respective carbon footprints by looking at one or two behaviors. Do what you can, and I'll do what I can.

Belatedly, A Guest Book!

Why didn’t I think of it sooner? I used to have a guest book at the bookstore but haven’t for years now, and it only occurred to me the other day that having people write of their visits would be the perfect way to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of Dog Ears Books. I had the thought, then lost it, then had it again – and again – as longtime annual visitors from St. Louis were here … a man from Cincinnati made the drive from Frankfort just to come to Dog Ears Books … the woman who photographed my dog Sarah with her phone and kept the photo on the phone for years came in with her family, boys now quite grown up – and someone else who told me, “This is my favorite bookstore in the world!” Really?! I’m not kidding, he said that. But his words were nowhere recorded!

 

So now, when you visit this summer, you can record your compliments (or complaints), memories, and future hopes in my new keepsake book from the Pennington Collection! Good idea, yes?

 

Busy Times For Us All

Illinois got tornadoes, everyone is getting smoky air, but our end of the Leelanau peninsula did not get rain that was forecast for earlier this week. (After I mowed my yard the night before, too, just to be ready!) Farmers market started a week late in Northport, because of new paving in the marina parking lot, but it was going strong today, and I finally got my maple syrup from Al and Margo Ammons. I’m going to take my usual Sunday off this weekend but will probably bend the schedule to open on Monday, since Tuesday is, after all, the 4^th of July – thirty years since my first bookstore opened in that little, long-gone shed down Waukazoo Street. In retrospect, time does fly. Sometimes the moments fly in passing, too. A pause every hour, even for half a minute, can be important. Ah! We’re here now. We're here now.

Thank you, Heather!!!!!

It’s About Time: Kathleen Stocking Comes Home

From the Place of the 

Gathering Light:

Leelanau Pieces

by Kathleen Stocking

Even now that I’ve moved to a senior residential community in nearby Traverse City, I’m still from the place that has made me, that has informed my sense of the world, that taught me who I am, who I think I am, that has given me my ideas and my core self. - Kathleen Stocking, From the Place of the Gathering Light: Leelanau Pieces

Kathleen Stocking’s first book of essays, Letters from the Leelanau, burst onto the northern Michigan scene in 1990, selling in numbers that took the University of Michigan Press completely by surprise. The first print run was only 500 copies, but then, noticed by and raved in the New York Times, the book quickly went on to become a classic and is still in print. 

When she came to my bookstore in Northport to do a reading from her third book, The Long Arc of the Universe, essays ranging from her Michigan life to experiences teaching in California prisons, a rich kids’ school in San Salvador, and Peace Corps teaching assignments in Thailand and Romania, part of my introduction to the audience assembled was — and I believe this to be true, if not for descendants of the Odawa and Ojibway peoples or third- and fourth-generation locals, surely for those of us who arrived only in the latter decades of the twentieth century — “If you haven’t read Kathleen Stocking, you don’t know Leelanau.” So it is a great gift she gives us with her new book, Gathering Light — another collection of essays focused on the Leelanau but informed by almost thirty additional years of observing nature, participating in community, reading voraciously, traveling bravely, and endlessly pondering life on earth, from our little Up North paradise as it evolved through time to our place in the universe.

Kathleen Stocking’s essays, while personal, are about much more than her own life, rich and overflowingly full as that life always has been and continues to be. Essays in the new book are divided into seasonal sections, and over and over we are reminded that our brief time is but the thinnest of glazes atop the rich layer cake (she uses the image in one section) of geologic time.

Geology is interesting psychologically because to approach it, at least for me, requires examination of the fabric of space-time and the physics of consciousness. 

Thoughts of geology inform her thought as deeply as does her awareness of wildflowers and the history of county families. Following a fragment of quoted conversation by a Suttons Bay geologist about Michigan eight hundred million years ago, for instance, she writes:

The whole mass of quivering geologic time lies in that downhome, tossed-off remark.

Quivering awareness, I say, in her response And yet, presented in nonspecialist, everyday language and images. She writes, the reader sees.

Consciousness of history is also intricately woven into Stocking’s accounts of walks and drives and conversations and memories recalled from childhood, and woven in so gracefully, so naturally, that it never interrupts her narrative. How long, in the sweep of geologic time, have human beings been on earth? In the space of human history, how long have white people been in Michigan? How many of us who call Leelanau home today are aware of early black pioneer families in what is now Sleeping Bear National Lakeshore, and how many know that while whites and blacks were buried together in cemeteries around the county, for a long time Natives were buried outside the fences? Why is this knowledge important?

History, like lighthouses, helps position us so we can understand where we are, relative to where we were, and relative to where we might be heading. 

Stocking, like an old-time lighthouse keeper, keeps track of everything at once — boats, storms, lives, mechanical equipment — such that her questions and thoughts infect our own. And thank heaven they do! Whether writing about the relatively youthful movement of local community-supported agriculture, new, start-up wineries, talented young local musicians Ruby John and Jonah Powell, or her own childhood days in the woods with her father, timberman Pierce Stocking, she never lets a reader get so comfortable that the broader worldview is lost. “It’s about imagining the future,” she writes. “It’s about seeing one’s self as another.” The lighthouse keeper in Stocking asks us to navigate between our safe, precious home and places in the world where privilege is unknown, life not safe. 

Years ago another dear friend, a woman who follows sports in a way alien to me but with whom I have many other abiding interests and loves in common, wrote to me something about baseball that I’ve never forgotten. Maybe she was quoting someone else. I don’t remember. Somewhere in a trunk that old letter, carefully saved, awaits re-reading, but for now I can only paraphrase. Baseball, she wrote, is the only game where the object is not about annihilating the opposition but about coming home. 

In some ways, of course, we never leave home. We take it with us wherever we go. And wherever we go, the experiences that we have come back home with us when we return. This is particularly apparent in Kathleen Stocking’s life and work. From Letters from the Leelanau to Lake Country to The Long Arc of the Universe to From the Place of the Gathering Light, we have now the arc of a serious and important contribution to American literature, and while we can take a kind of regional pride in the fact that the contribution grew from Michigan soil, I hope our gratitude to the writer and recognition of her accomplishments will eclipse any credit we may want to give ourselves. Kathleen Stocking is a treasure. We are fortunate to have her among us.

One more note: As was indicated in the title of her previous book, somehow -- with all her knowledge of world history and hands-on experiences in parts of the world where life is truly dismal -- Kathleen Stocking manages to be optimistic about the future of mankind. She thinks we have it in us to work together to expand the realm of human rights and even reverse the ongoing degradation of the environment. Even if our generation (hers and mine) doesn't live to see it, she has faith in a more-than-possible good future for our descendants. So again I say -- what a gift we have in her work!

A New Kind of Radicalism

Before sunrise

The ‘right’ answer is no longer understood as one that can’t go wrong but rather as one that everyone can agree is worth trying, given the knowledge available. ‘Adaptive management’ … stresses the importance of constantly reevaluating our knowledge and assumptions … based on the results of previous action.  

- Nathan F. Sayre, Working Wilderness: The Malpai Borderlands Group and the Future of the Western Range

The ellipses I have inserted in the quote opening today’s post are not intended to slant the discussion but to broaden it. The quotation comes from a book that focuses on the Western range, and the approach of the Malpai Borderlands Group is ecological. Material omitted above is as follows: (1) “from which ecosystem management is derived” and (2) “about ecosystems.” I omitted that material because what I’m wondering is whether or not — and if so, how — the approach this group has taken, their formation of a “radical center,” might be broadened to address divisions in American society beyond ecosystem management. 

To understand my question, though, it will probably help to go back to the particular problem faced in southern Arizona and New Mexico and how the Malpai Group has sought to address it. At stake — for everyone — was protection of the land they loved. How best to protect the land and for whom and for what: the crucial ecological questions could not be addressed outside political considerations. Ranchers, understandably, wanted to continue ranching, which meant grazing their cattle on both private and public lands. Environmentalists believed, because the assumption had been enshrined in public policy for decades, that grazing degraded the environment and had to be reduced, if not stopped outright. (When a conservation group acquired land, therefore, it generally took that land out of the ranch economy entirely.) Battle lines had been drawn, therefore, with positions entrenched and parties unable to grant an inch to their opposition. 

Meetings of ranchers, land managers, wildlife officials, and environmentalists routinely degenerated into insulting tirades….

What have I left out at the end of that sentence? Here’s how it wraps up: 

… whereas the Malpai discussions and subsequent get-togethers managed to remain civil and constructive. 

With, I might add, people coming from the same kinds of groups and backgrounds as attended the disorderly, unproductive meetings marked by “insulting tirades.” What was the difference? That difference was not in the life experience of those involved or in their educations or larger political allegiances.  It was a genuine concern for a specific geographic area and the realization that without new and genuine solutions for that area’s problems, everyone involved would lose. 

Trust was not immediately granted to the group, and not everyone in the area was interested in joining. The movement that created the group was literally and metaphorically grassroots, but it did not spring full-blown into being overnight. It began with a discussion group coming together to determine points of agreement, finally culminating in an official statement:

To reverse this [existing political] polarization [between ranchers and environmentalists], which is a no-win situation for the land and everyone concerned, the ‘Malpai Meeting’ proposes that a concerned effort be made to identify the conservational common ground that unites all of us who love the land, then to create programs in which we can work together to implement the values we share.

Valuing the land itself was the bedrock common value of the group.

All [of us] who love the land agree that it should not be cashed-in or mined-out and that its health takes precedence over profits.

That “over profits” part makes for a strong statement, given that ranching families depend on making their livelihood from the land, but that livelihood depends on the land’s health, and so the ranchers have the strongest economic stake, along with a deep love often going back generations — what Wendell Berry calls “affection” for the very specific piece of the earth they call home. 

The scourge of mesquite that the Artist and I could not help noticing when we first arrived in southeast Arizona is more than an aesthetic concern. When shrubs outcompete grass, grazing suffers. On land dominated by woody plants with increasingly bare earth between shrubs, the desert’s sparse rainfall is lost more quickly to runoff, carrying with it more and more of the already thin topsoil. Without topsoil, and with shrubs having gained the upper hand, merely removing cattle from the land is no guarantee whatsoever that grasslands will regenerate. Old “wisdom” that called for maximum numbers of grazing animals per acre has proved insufficient protection for the land. Rainfall varies from season to season and year to year, and so both available water and season need to be taken into account when determining where and how many animals to graze. A universal formula (the holy grail of science) doesn’t cut it. “Averages” do not occur in nature. 

— And here I will cut to the chase and reveal that fire is a big part of the long-term solution for preserving Southwestern desert grasslands. Decades of fire suppression are what gave mesquite the upper hand over grass. The overall situation, of course, is much more complex than what I have presented here, and anyone interested is advised to look into the book from which I have drawn my information. My own point today, here, much as I have come to love southeast Arizona and care for its future, is a broader one. 

The “radical center” position created by the Malpai Borderlands Group, the author of the book explains, “was not simply centrist.

Rather than splitting the difference between two extremes, the radical center aimed to discard the polar oppositions that defined the spectrum in the first place.

I love that! This “center” is not some meaningless compromise where no one ends up satisfied. The goal of the group was nothing less than —

to unite ranching and conversation, to make them complementary and symbiotic if not synonymous … [in an] effort that would have to be public and multilateral.

Persons involved began by meeting in conversation to find common values. Their conversations were kept civil. Rejecting “expert” advice that had not worked in the past, they did not reject science but insisted on research conducted locally by scientists not wedded to specific outcomes promoted by any particular group. Members of the MBG, like the researchers on their lands, were determined to maintain open minds. 

Quick recap:

Civil conversation among open-minded people not wedded in advance to specific political outcomes but agreeing to examine empirical evidence to determine what best accomplishes their shared goals. 

That is how I see the MBG example as applicable to widely diverse economic, social, and environmental problems in other parts of our country. Can you see it, too?

Not everyone in the AZ/NM borderlands area, I’m sure, has joined the Malpai Borderlands Group. True, that’s just a guess on my part, but think about it. Even when a new approach to solving an old problem outperforms previous attempts, there are usually a few people who continue, in the face of all evidence, to clutch tightly to their previous ideologically-driven beliefs. That’s why I wouldn't be surprised if a few unconvinced extremists remain on both ends of the political continuum. But I bring that up not to cast any bad light on anyone but merely to urge those who would seek consensus and cooperation — and results — to realize that it is possible for committed individuals to join together and move forward without everyone within earshot being on board. 

No individual or group in history has ever had 100% support and devotion. It isn’t necessary. Without 100% of a population being on board, however, the more people who come to see cooperation and empirical research bringing tangible benefits to all concerned, themselves included, the more support the “radical center” will gain — provided it holds to a nonconfrontational, noncoercive, open-minded approach. 

What do you think? Worth a try in other areas of community life, in other parts of the United States? “Git ‘er done!” How about it?

Postscript, 4/10

In my eagerness to share the story of the Malpai Borderlands Group and my ideas for how what worked for them could work in other places and other situations, I may have glossed too quickly over another piece contributing to the group’s success. You see, it was not only that a civil conversation uncovered common values. It was much more. This group of property owners, environmentalists, ranchers, scientists, and government agency employees came together to address a specific problem because they shared a common goal. 

“Our goal is to restore and maintain the natural processes that create and protect a healthy, unfragmented landscape to support a diverse, flourishing community of human, plant, and animal life in our borderlands region.” 

The problem was that their regional landscape was threatened in several ways. Their mission was to find strategies to reach their shared goal (“to restore and maintain … natural processes…”) by accomplishing clear objectives embedded in the goal statement — preventing fragmentation, restoring grasslands, remediating shrub encroachment, and conserving ranching as a livelihood. 

It’s one thing for people who disagree politically to come together to try listening to one another’s views. That’s very, very hard — and maybe it isn’t even worth the time spent. On the other hand, when people in a community, who share some common core value or values, disagree over how to accomplish a shared goal — that’s when conversation is most likely to be successful, as long as political ideologies, religious differences, “how we’ve always done things,” and the like can be set aside and the question at hand approached with open minds. When there is something that people agree needs doing, their problem is no longer a matter of abstract principle but a question of what will work. Pragmatism is America’s contribution to Western philosophy, and Americans have always been noted for their ability to find ways to get things done.

An ecological community, a village, a school district, a county fair committee, even a church — all, from time to time, face specific problems requiring consensus on how the problems will be solved. Too often the necessary discussions disintegrate into unproductive, painful, “insulting tirades.” A better model is available, if we’re adult enough to adopt it.

It's All Mesquite to Me

Cows wander through it

Normal winter temperatures have returned: at night the air here in Dos Cabezas plunges below freezing and by day barely makes it into the 50s, making it much more like the winter we remember from three years ago. We keep the cabin warm with a propane heater and are comfortable indoors night and day, but when I go outside with Sarah, I leave the warmth  reluctantly. I put on jacket and hat and mittens, and on a still morning, walking into the west, I feel chill air on my face, even without a noticeable breeze. And yet — I also feel the sun on my back, and the sun feels warm, warm despite the chilly air, and I relax into my walk, losing any sense of hurry to get back indoors. 

Someone should put together a book of southeast Arizona desert vegetation in winter. This tree by the wash, 15-20 feet in height, with multiple trunks and with a tangled nest of twig-like branches bristling (so many desert plants “bristle,” in one way or another) with small dark orange berries — what is it? The book I have consulted on Arizona plants is very complete as far as it goes, explaining the Latin names, giving economic uses for plants and listing animals that feed on them, and showing photographs of entire trees in full leaf and line drawings of those characteristic leaves. But what do they look like now, in winter, bare of leaves and yet full of last season’s fruit? That’s what I need to know! 

My best guess for the tree in the pictures above is netleaf hackberry, Celtis reticulata, a member of the elm family not at all reminiscent of the stately American elm of the Midwest. My source says:

This hackberry occurs as a small tree, up to 30 feet tall and less than 1 foot in diameter, generally. It grows along dry washes, desert grasslands and river valleys.... Its characteristically scraggly appearance develops because several feet of new growth occur on only a few limbs during years of adequate water.... 

-- from Woody Plants of the Southwest: A Field Guide with Descriptive Text, Drawings, Range Maps and Photographs, by Samuel H. Lamb. Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 1989

Anyone else want to weigh in?

Then there are the grasses and brooms and other ground plants. There are half a dozen only a few steps from the cabin door, but identifying them in books from their winter appearance is beyond my capability.

As for the many brittle hardwood shrub-like plants, branches alive and, yes, bristling with thorns, they are all “mesquite” to me, though I know there is more than one species and probably more than one genus here in the ghost town. There is even, I find in the plant book, more than one “catclaw”! There are catclaw mesquite and catclaw mimosa. (And no, spelling program, I do not mean “catcall,” so please stop “correcting” my spelling!”) Those I think I could tell apart by their long, pea-like seed pods, similar but distinctive. Both are in the legume family (as are all the mesquites), but the mimosa pods curl. Three years ago I had quite a collection of dry seed pods. This year I can't find a single one near the cabin. Was the drought so severe and food so scarce that cattle and deer ate them all? Perhaps there is another explanation, but I have no idea what it might be.

There was a photo of a small oak in my account of our most recent drive through the Stockton Pass in the Pinaleno Mountains, but learning the various Arizona oaks is a project requiring more ambition than I possess in that direction. Often, whether it’s a question of a tree, a wildflower, or a bird, I’m satisfied if I can mentally attach to it the correct genus. Often, but not always. The sparrows (like warblers, so numerous, various, and confusing!) challenge me to greater efforts. Just the other day I came in from a walk to consult the bird book and felt triumphant when I was able to identify a bird I had seen in the wash as a black-throated sparrow. Understand — black-throated sparrows are far from rare: the book says it is “Arizona’s most widespread and numerous breeding sparrow” (Birds of Southeast Arizona, by Richard Cachor Taylor [Olympia, WA: R. W. Morse Co., 2010). So my sighting, if I want to give seeing the bird a fancy name, is no great event. It’s nothing like seeing, three years ago, the hooded oriole here in Dos Cabezas or the vermilion flycatcher in Willcox. It’s not even as exciting, objectively speaking, as the little loggerhead shrike I saw out at Twin Ponds our first winter here. 

Vermilion flycatcher, Willcox, AZ, 2015

But that’s just it, don’t you see? Excitement has nothing to do with objectivity. My little sparrow triumph made me happy. I’ll go further. I would not give up my excitement over ordinary events for all the objectivity in the world! Do I “romanticize” my life? (I have been accused of that more than once.) Well, if I don’t, who will? And if I were to stop, what would I gain?

“Horses! Look, horses!”  Well, why in the world would I ever want to give up the joy I feel at the very sight of them? Let others shrug and roll their eyes and twist their mouths into disdainful, supercilious looks. Their hearts are not swelling with happiness! How would the world be better if any of us were to feel less happiness on a daily basis?

As for the mesquite and all the other dark, unremarkable, bare-branched plants I see every day on the high desert floor, while I regret the way they have overtaken so many square miles, replacing more diverse vegetation suitable to grazing and browsing, and while I would love to see the high desert grassland reclaimed and flourishing, rather than simply used up, it’s also true that as I look out over this scrubby, scruffy, poor, eroded, overgrazed land, I feel an irresistible and growing affection for it just the way it is. The plants and animals here, from mesquite and cow to cholla and packrat, are only doing what every plant and animal species does, including human beings: they’re trying to make a living in the place circumstance has placed them, and we’re all here now, trying to find ways to live together. 

Now, finally, early, early this morning, for the first time this year we heard the familiar chorus of coyote song, a sound we heard often during our first stay three years ago. Arizona is not Michigan, and the ghost town cabin we call home here is not our country farmhouse in Leelanau County, but the coyotes sound the same both places. They sound like home.

I believe this cholla to be Tasajo

What Can One Small Person Do?

Ten-year-old needs a little break

First things first: my schedule for September, somewhat complicated, but I’ll try to make it clear.

Friday, Sept. 15, I’ll be closing at 4 p.m.

Saturday, Sept. 16, I’ll be opening late (following an 11 o’clock memorial service up the hill) but will be open until 5 p.m.

Then, from Sunday, Sept. 17, through Monday, Sept. 25, the bookstore will be closed for vacation.

I’ll be back in the shop on Tuesday, with regular hours (11-5) Tuesday and Wednesday and Friday and Saturday, plus the evening event with author Bob Downes on Thursday, Sept. 28, at 7 p.m. (see sidebar).

*  *  *

Okay, now to come back to our sheep -- or, more literally, to books –

Last Wednesday, Sept. 13, I attended a book event at Trinity Congregational Church. Mistakenly, I expected the book’s author, Sarah Van Gelder, to be in attendance, but it turns out she will be in town on Oct. 7, and meanwhile people in town were getting together for a preliminary discussion of her book, The Revolution Where You Live: Stories From a 12,000-Mile Journey Through a New America.

Some people at the church on Wednesday evening had read the book; others (like me) were about halfway through it; and a few had not yet started. Presenters Nancy Fitzgerald and Marie-Helena Gaspari, however, had prepared and led us through a set of exercises to generate discussion and get everyone thinking about questions we might want to ask Sarah Van Gelder when she comes to town. The presenters did a magnificent job. The meeting only took an hour (with cookies and lemonade afterward), and it was an hour very, very well spent.

One woman admitted she had postponed opening the book because she was afraid it would be just one more “Ain’t it awful?” collection of horror stories around the country. Nothing, she realized when she finally started reading, could be further from the truth. Avoiding the big cities on the east and west coasts, Van Gelder visited reservations, small towns, Midwestern rust belt cities, and communities in Appalachia, finding everywhere people who loved their homes and were finding ways to come together to overcome racism, inequality, environmental threats, and unemployment. She met with activists of every stripe and learned that the solutions people were attempting to put into place were always unique to those communities, their histories and their specific challenges.

For me, a theme that ran throughout the book was restoration. Early in the book Van Gelder met with ranchers in Montana practicing restorative grazing, sometimes called mob grazing, a practice I first read about in the magazine Acres USA. Before the book ends, she has encountered a Virginia town dedicated to restorative justice, a process whereby those convicted of violent crime can begin to make amends to victims and be re-integrated into the community rather than becoming life-long outcasts. In between were burned-out city neighborhoods being restored to productive local food-growing projects and employee-owned businesses restoring dignity to owner-workers. And the stories in the book connected not only with my readings in eco-agriculture but also to more recent readings I’ve been doing in ecological economics and steady-state economy, work both by and inspired by the work of economist Herman E. Daly, so that I feel much as I did my first semester in college, learning many new things and seeing many connections across exciting disciplines.

Another participant confided to me quietly that she felt the tasks to be accomplished in our country were huge and overwhelming. Well, they are huge, and they certainly can be overwhelming, and I certainly know the feeling she was talking about. I think it’s like preparing to move from one house to another: You look at everything that has to be packed up and transported, and what needs to be done looks impossible. All you can do is start with one room or even one closet or a single kitchen drawer and make progress little by little.

For myself, I think the biggest challenge is not the enormous size of the task but how easily I can be paralyzed at the thought of my own smallness. Another message of Van Gelder’s book, however, is that people do not have to be wealthy or hold political clout to come together and accomplish crucially important work for their communities.

When I come back to my bookstore after a few days of vacation, I’ll be hosting an author presentation and book signing, and to be perfectly honest I had a little anticipatory trepidation about the book that I did not share with the author. I’m always a little apprehensive when non-Native writers create Native American characters in their fiction. I have enough confidence in Bob Downes that I know he is respectful of Native culture and history – he not only did considerable research but is also learning the Anishnabe language – but there are still sometimes touchy feelings about who gets to tell whose stories, and not all non-Native writers are as serious as Bob when injecting Native culture into their fiction.

So now, to answer Sarah Van Gelder’s question about what “one small [specific] person” (me) can do to help my community, I want to collect a diverse audience for Bob’s events – not only ethnically diverse, but diverse in terms of age – and I’ll be taking proactive steps to try to make that happen.

A bookstore, after all, especially a small, independent bookstore in a little northern village, is all about connections. Someone the other evening had the kindness to refer to my bookstore as one local “pocket of hope.” Now it’s up to me to live up to that challenging designation.

Just How Hard IS Change?

Good morning!

I’m coming back today to a book that cheered and energized me last week. In Switch: How to Change Things When Change is Hard, Chip Heath & Dan Heath don’t tell us that change is ever easy, but they do make a convincing case that we can make change easier by approaching it differently.

Here’s how too many of us (yes, me, too), often react, when people aren’t making changes we want them to make:

“How can they be so stupid? And lazy! Can’t they see past their noses? Can’t they use their heads?” Sartre said (or, at least, is said to have said), “Hell is other people,” and who hasn’t felt frustration at the apparent intransigeance of other people? But every single one of us is an other. We meet face to face or online or over the phone: to me, you are the other. To you, I am. And that’s just how it is.

Chip Heath and Dan Heath – and I’m going to call them H&H from now on – cite numerous research studies and tell many true stories in every chapter. They are not simply “brainstorming” or speculating on how change might be made easier. Their tips and recommendations are clear and specific and backed up by results. And whether I want to change myself or someone else or a whole group of people, the basic empirical insights hold. H&H tell us story after story of changes that worked, changes initiated by people with no special authority or power other than an ability to see how to do things a different way.

Do human beings "stubbornly resist" change? Maybe the change they are asked to make isn’t clear to them. “What looks like resistance,” the authors say, “is often a lack of clarity. So provide crystal-clear direction.”

For instance, “Eat a healthier diet” is not specific. – And here I have to interrupt myself to say I don’t at all like the authors’ example, because it has to do with buying and drinking milk with only 1% butterfat rather than whole milk, and I am not at all convinced that whole milk is unhealthy (in fact, it drives me crazy that most of the yogurt in the grocery store case is nonfat!), but that’s not the point. The point is to give clear, specific instructions, and make them easy to follow.

H&H also say, “What looks like a people problem is often a situation problem.” All of us depend on routines and habits to get through the day, and if we have to think too much, uncertainty about what to do can be paralyzing. Too many possible choices or an ambiguous situation will make our minds anxious, and when anxious, we revert by default to a familiar path, seeking our comfort zone. If we can’t, studies have shown that operating outside a comfort zone for too long results in deteriorating task performance. The mere experience of applying willpower to not eating a plate of cookies left in the room with them resulted in subjects performing more poorly on a task than other subjects without the antecedent test of will. Self-discipline wears us out. We only have so much energy for it. So we’re better off devising little tricks to keep ourselves in line.

In order to brave a new path, we also need a motive. Emotion is the “elephant,” in the book’s terms, intellect the “rider,” though I’ve avoided that language here. The important point is that to effect change, in ourselves or others, we must appeal not only to the intellect but also to emotion.

Here’s an astonishing revelation from early in the book. Can you believe that of the 24 most commonly used English words for emotion, only six are positive? Our language, and probably our brain itself, is more alert to threats than to happiness, probably for reasons important to survival – but still, that’s what we see all too often in each other, even when it isn’t there. I see not what you’re doing right but what you’re doing wrong, not the good you’ve done but the good you’ve failed to do. And how motivated are you by criticism? Me, not very!

All the logic in the world does not induce people to change without emotional appeal. Argument and reason are good, often necessary, but by themselves insufficient. Okay, what kind of emotional appeal? How about fear? Fear is a strong motivator, H&H acknowledge, but works best in the short term. It doesn’t work all that well for problems requiring incremental change over the long term. Why would that be?

Well, fear is one of those negative emotions.

When you’re angry, your eyes narrow and your fists clench and you get ready for confrontation. When you’re disgusted, your nose wrinkles and you avoid whatever has grossed you out. When you’re afraid, your eyes grow wide and your body tenses up and prepares to flee. On a daily basis, then, negative emotions help us avoid risks and confront problems.

Narrowed eyes, clenched fists, tense body – that’s how we respond when we’re in the grip of a negative emotion. Fight or flight! says the mind. Don't confuse me with more options! But that narrowing effect also works on our thoughts and doesn’t help when what we need is a broader vision, when we need to innovate, and to grow.

The positive emotion of interest broadens what we want to investigate. When we’re interested, we want to get involved, to learn new things, to tackle new experiences. We become more open to new ideas. The positive emotion of pride, experienced when we achieve a personal goal, broadens the kinds of tasks we contemplate for the future, encouraging us to pursue even bigger goals.

Appeals, therefore, to positive emotions – excitement, hope, optimism – motivate people to embrace change.

One tip the authors give is to focus on success, however small, and build on it. They call it “finding the bright spots.” Say your son was failing all his junior high classes but this semester managed to get a B in one of them. Talk to him about that good grade, help him find out what made the difference in that class and how he might be able to extend his success into other subjects. In general, don’t look for problems but for what’s working.

Another is to shrink the change. Don’t ask for a big change all at once. Show people ways they have already, without being aware of changing, taken the first couple of steps, and it's like magic!

He's on his way!

It also helps to provide “environmental tweaks.” These, H&H say, “beat self control every time,” whether it’s my own behavior or someone else’s I want to change. One simple example (we’ve use this in our home) is to use smaller plates on the dinner table. Rearranging furniture is another way to tweak the environment and change the situation. Shaping the environment changes behavior, and it’s easier, more efficient, and more pleasant to shape new behaviors that way than by hectoring and scolding. You don’t even have to talk about it!

I’ve hardly done justice to this book, because I’ve been boiling down to prescriptions what the authors present in exciting stories of change. You just need to read it for yourself. Switch is written largely (not exclusively) from and with a business perspective, but the implications go way beyond. In fact, I can hardly think of a realm where they would not be appropriate.

So, from what I’ve said so far, let me ask what lessons you would draw from the H&H prescriptions when it comes to working for political change? ??? If you’re not feeling optimistic yet, blame it on me and not on the authors, go to the library, and give H&H a reading for yourself. (I’ll order the hardcover for anyone who requests it; unfortunately, the book was never issued in paper. I also have 2-3 used copies winging their the way to me.)

If you buy the book from me and read the whole thing and don’t feel the faintest glimmer of hope, I’ll cheerfully refund your money and take the book back, knowing that it will inspire someone else. What I hope for, really, is a community of energized, hopeful people ready to go at change in a whole new way. Maybe we can help each other? I’d love to travel hopefully into the future! Wouldn't you?