Eugene weekly., March 10, 2005, Page 13, Image 13

2005 PIELC — Living As If Nature Mattered
Turtle Island
Health Care
presents
“Winds of Change”
The first in a series
of lectures on the
Five Element Theory
of Chinese Medicine
Taught by Dr. Casey Carter, LAc., D.C., O.M.D.,
and Holly Jones, M.A.c., LAc.
This class will focus on the
Spring element — WOOD
ROBB GRUBB
We will sketch and study plants of the
WOOD element during a brief plant
walk. Wear comfortable clothing and
bring appropriate art supplies.
Don’t Get Sad,
Get Mad
Environmental legend Martin Litton
drops in with some advice.
BY SETH CLARK WALKER
I
n the environmental classic Encounters
with the Archdruid, author John McPhee
pits 1960s firebrand Floyd Dominy, then
head of the dam-building Bureau of
Reclamation, against David Brower, then
executive director of the Sierra Club, in an
epic battle over the management of much of
the West’s ecosystem. One of Brower’s allies
in that fight was Martin Litton, a man
Brower would later call his “conservation
conscience for more years than I will ever
admit.”
At 88 years young, Litton remains “bitter
for the cause,” as McPhee described him in
Archdruid, and he dropped in on the PIELC
on Sunday to spread his gospel. He still flies
his own 54-year-old Cessna 195 around the
West, telephoto lens in tow, documenting
scenes of environmental destruction. The
former Sierra Club board member (he chose
not to renew his board seat years ago) was
one of the country’s early no-compromise
environmentalists, and he helped move parts
of the enviro movement further left. Today
he often bears resemblance to an environ-
mental Santa Claus in a nice dinner jacket,
and he made a few minutes for EW. The
excerpts:
Fifty years later, do you still think “no
compromise” is the right approach?
When you compromise, you lose. When
you’re reasonable, you’ve lost all your fire.
You don’t want to accomplish anything.
But aren’t people apt not to listen if
you’re not reasonable?
Who cares? I think many people want to
be unreasonable – we saw that at the confer-
ence. If you sit down with your enemy, it’s
crazy. I don’t mind being ignored, hated. I
think we’re in desperate straits. The Earth is
dying, and we don’t want to even recognize it.
Saturday, March 19
Noon-3pm
Class begins at
Turtle Island Health Care
56 Oakway Center
on the Heritage Courtyard
above Merle Norman Cosmetics
$35 Pre-Registration Fee
(or $45 the day of the class)
To Register Call
683-5600
You’ve said that the Earth is not going
to die with a bang, but with a whimper.
What can we all do to ease the suffering?
It’s so hard because it’s such a monumen-
tal task and each one of us can only do a lit-
tle. Live frugally. Buy nothing that you can
get along without. Never turn on a TV set;
I’m guilty of that. Don’t be conned by the
commercial world. Do something about the
rate of reproduction worldwide.
How do you reconcile your own con-
tradictions? You eat steak. You could be a
vegetarian.
Yes, but what would the vegetables be?
They’d be artificially produced, irrigated.
Anything we do as “civilized” beings is
counter to nature. All we can say is, we have
to do less.
So is “less” the answer?
Yes it is, in a way. In other words, you
really shouldn’t have to go into any small
American town and see that two-thirds of the
buildings are closed. Then you go out to one
of these shopping malls and see thousands of
cars parked there, pavement everywhere. It’s
destroying our towns. We all have to recog-
nize that it’s too late. Nature is gone.
Anywhere in the world, you can hardly find
a wilderness that’s more than a few miles
wide.
I’m feeling sad.
Don’t feel sad. Feel mad.
So if we get mad, what can we do?
You can call a spade a spade. Do what
you were doing over the weekend — look for
solutions.
ew
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