songs of experience

Every season I choose a theme for seejanerun and this fall I have selected “Nature” as my theme because of our goal race …. a 10-mile trail race in Charlottesville, VA … and because this is our fourth year of putting on The Pumpkin Trail Run in Chapel Hill. Our mission for this race has always been to raise awareness of the need to preserve green-space for the running, walking, biking [moving through space] community. Specifically, we have been lobbying for UNC to save/set aside a chunk of land in the 1,000 acre-wood, known to us as The University Woodlands (re-named Carolina North), for running trails. This morning in my coffee-read time, I came across a wonderful passage by Wendell Berry that sums up WHY we should respect our common ground:

�If the human and natural communities are given no standing in the computations, then the large farm or other large enterprise [i.e. UNC, Wal-Mart] acts as a siphon to drain economic and other values out of the locality into the “gross national product.� This happens because its technology functions on behalf of the national economy, not the local economy.

The only preventive and the only remedy is for the people to choose one another and their place, over the reward offered them by outside investors. The local community must understand itself finally as a community of interest – a common dependence on a common life and a common ground [our beloved trails]. And because a community is, by definition, placed, its success cannot be divided from the success of its place, its natural setting and surroundings: its soils, forests, grasslands, plants and animals, water, light, and air. The two economies, the natural and the human, support each other; each other’s hope of a durable and a livable life.�

by, Wendell Berry

“Does Community Have a Value?
1986