BYM Query #12

Personal Reflections on BYM Query #12.

The Environment

Are you concerned for responsible use of natural resources and their nurture for future generations? Do you try to avoid wasteful consumption and pollution? Do you seek to preserve the beauty and balance of God’s world?(BYM, 1988, p.39)

I shall attempt to reflect on this query from the standpoints of (a) personal experience; and (b) initial thoughts, still in progress, from the viewpoint of the importance of queries in the spiritual life of the Meeting as a corporate body.

A .Personal Experience

The environment has been close to my work interests throughout the Quaker years of my life. Here is a brief summary:

As a college senior, I discovered that there was an academic discipline called geography, the purpose of which was to analyze the relationships between human societies and the natural environment, so I entered a graduate program in geography at the University of Chicago.

While there, Donna and I became convinced Friends and joined the 57^th street Meeting. My mentor and thesis advisor was Gilbert F. White, then chair of the American Friends Service Committee and the leading U. S. geographic expert on water resources management. Those familiar with the varieties of belief among Quakers may know that Illinois Yearly Meeting is traditionally Hicksite. Our first exposure to Faith and Practice was the one from Philadelphia in use at the time (PYM, 1955) A section of the queries in this version addresses the “stewardship of the environment” (PYM,1955, p.213). The first of six different questions reads:

Is the Meeting concerned that human interaction with nature be responsible, guided by a reverence for life and a sense of the splendor of God’s continuing creation?

The last one in the list brings the focus back from the corporate Meeting to the individual :

Do I choose with care the use of technology and devices that truly simplify and add quality to my life without adding an undue burden to essential resources?

Under Gilbert’s tutelage, I completed a Master’s thesis on “Reservoir resettlement in Africa,” a study of how government and U.N. sponsored resettlement programs arising from the flooding of traditional resource areas by the construction of dams at Aswan on the Nile, Akosombo on the Volta, and Kariba on the Zambezi River, had already affected, or would potentially impact, the livelihoods and ways of life of those displaced.

It is inspiring to recall that this spirit-led scholar was even then in the process of broadening his focus from “human adjustment to floods” to all kinds of natural hazards including tornadoes, tsunamis, coastal erosion, earthquakes, etc. Years before, my first week in Chicago had been spent walking the length of the city’s magnificent lakefront park. After finishing the master’s study, I turned my attention to issues of recreation geography and open space planning. I spent a summer as a research assistant to a U. of C. economist His research demonstrated that the predicted recreational benefits of reservoirs in South Dakota, Pennsylvania, and elsewhere were being exaggerated by the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers in the benefit/cost studies required by Congress to justify the projects. Using the analytical skills acquired in preparation for this study, I spent the following summer back home in New Jersey as a volunteer for the New York City chapter of the Sierra Club. At the time, the club was supporting a proposal to build a dam at Tocks Island in the Delaware Water Gap , a scenic river segment through which I used to lead canoe trips.. The dam was part of a proposed project to create a national recreation area. The club favored the project because it would enable the National Park Service to preserve some of the rapidly disappearing natural area close to New York City. I suggested that the loss of recreational benefits caused by impounding the river would be greater than the alleged benefits of sailboating and motorboating on the reservoir. The club changed its position to favor a national recreation area without the dam, which was the eventual outcome.

Meanwhile, I continued in graduate school and did a Ph.D. study at the University of Ottawa on “The use and Non-use of urban parks: accessibility and social characteristics in relation to pubic outdoor recreation in selected neighbourhoods of Ottawa-Hull.” Ottawa, Canada is a city rich in parks and open spaces. I tried to find answers to urban planner Jane Jacobs’s question, “Why are there so often no parks where the people are, and no people where the parks are?(Jacobs, 1961, p.95)”

We became” sojourning members” of Ottawa Monthly Meeting. We requested this status in response to an Orthodox advice recommending that Friends should reside close to their meetings and regularly attend meetings for business.

We had difficulty adjusting to Ottawa meeting, for various reasons including the different flavor of Quakerism we found there. During our two-year sojourn, we were constantly being misunderstood and suspected of not being “real Quakers.” For example, it was just as we were leaving to move back to Chicago that we learned that some people in the meeting had assumed that I had been in Canada to avoid the draft. During those years, we frequently consulted the LYM book of discipline to check up on points of faith and practice, often from a sense that not everything in the Meeting was as it should be, or because our experience there was so different from what we had experienced in Chicago. When we moved back to Chicago, the closest meeting was a pastoral, programmed one, the Chicago Monthly Meeting on 108^th Street. We resumed attending 57^th Street Meeting until we moved to Richmond three years later.

The Orthodox Canada Yearly Meeting followed the faith and Practice of the then London Yearly Meeting (LYM,1959) Following British tradition, Ottawa Friends expected that Friends who relocated would immediately transfer membership to the new meeting. In this volume, there are more “advices” than “queries,” touching on many specific aspects of life, from choosing a career, whether divorced Friends should be permitted to re-marry, etc . Looking through the LYM book again, I could not find a query or advice with the term “environment” included. A web search of the web site for Britain Yearly Meeting (former London Yearly Meeting) revealed that the term occurs only in the Handbook for Wardens of meeting houses in Britain. In the process, I was reminded of how instrumental this version of Faith and Practice had been in shaping our experience and outlook as Quakers during the two formative years, as newly convinced Friends, we spent in Ottawa. We often had recourse to this book when there were difficulties and differences to be resolved in Meeting.

Ph.D. in hand, I took a teaching post at VCU and taught geographic techniques and open space planning until I retired 29 years later. This time, we requested a “certificate of removal” from 57^th Street to Richmond Monthly Meeting, thus coming into the discipline of the consolidated Baltimore Yearly Meeting.

I worked as a consultant on a proposed national recreation area in the Shawnee Hills in southern Illinois. An analysis of the potential recreation benefits showed that the project was too far from Chicago and other major urban areas to justify the project cost. Congressman Paul Simon, who wanted the project for his district, was disappointed; however in an editorial the Chi cago Tribune expressed satisfaction that the taxpayers’ money would be saved.

In Richmond, I began to work on the Virginia Outdoors Plan. I worked on several of the decennial updates, being generally assigned to work out the demands, supply, and needs analysis for each county and city in Virginia. While at VCU, I volunteered to serve on the National Committee for Digital Cartographic Data Standards. I joined the committee’s working group on cartographic feature definition, a group trying to standardize the definitions of real world phenomena being depicted on maps produced by U.S. government agencies. The assignment led me into further service as project leader for project teams on geographic feature definition of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). On these committees, I was privileged to work with colleagues from across the continent and all around the northern hemisphere (From west to east: United States of America, Canada, United Kingdom, Norway, Sweden, France, Germany, Czech Republic, Austria, China, Korea, Japan, and Russia ) during the two decades before I retired from VCU.

As I approached retirement, I became involved in what may turn out to be the most significant environmental issue of all: a project by the Rappahannock Indian Tribe to develop a spiritually based retreat center on some of their ancestral land near the river from which their name is derived. The tribe asked VCU to find a volunteer to do a feasibility study for the retreat center. I accepted the assignment. The tribe envisioned a center unlike any that exists anywhere else in the country, so there were no existing data, nor anything to compare it to, so the analysis was a challenge to my creativity. I produced a result that was positive and favorably received by the Tribal Council. Since then, I have been working on the implementation of their vision for the past four years. Seeking clearness to proceed, I had first met with the Peace and Social Concerns Committee to tell them about my leading in this direction. I met with the Indian Affairs Committee (IAC) of BYM to tell them about the project, and they added me as a co-opted member. Some members of the committee were pleased to find a way to connect with native people within the verge of the yearly meeting. The IAC recently held a meeting at the Rappahannock Cultural Center in Indian Neck, VA. The retreat center has been a wonderful project to be a part of. Having been forcibly resettled away from the river, the tribe is seeking to preserve and revive their traditional language and culture and to live once again in harmony with their natural environment. The more I am privileged to learn, from the Chief and other members of the tribal council, about the values going into the thinking behind this project, the more excited I become. It is an honor to be of help in whatever ways I can. In a way, it is a “reverse resettlement” project, seeking to reverse the damage to culture and the environment done in the past.

Queries in the life of the Meeting (in progress).

The existing BYM query seems to lack a sense of what we mean by environment. It guides us toward reducing our consumption of resources and preserving the amenity value of the environment we already have.

If we think broadly of the environment as the source of human material existence: food, shelter, clothing, and transportation, it is inextricably bound up with our way of life, our level of living, our social organization, and our culture including our spiritual lives—both as individuals and as a religious society. The beautiful open woodlands, soils, clean streams, lakes, waterways, clean air, trails, and roads encountered by the first English settlers here were managed, used, and made productive by native people, living in harmony with their environments over thousands of years. Then the land was invaded by English imbued with, as Talcott Parsons put it (Parsons, 1960), a value orientation of “instrumental activism,” or mankind dominating nature through technological means. Yet, for all we take from the environment, we rarely give thanks nor do we attempt to give back, by helping to manage the environment or serve as stewards to help foster its natural productivity. Another neglected aspect of enjoying the fruits of a productive environment is helping to ensure the distribution of its benefits to all. When I told my cousin Jim Rugg about my work on standards, he commented that he was in favor of standards. He thought that we should be able to define a basic level of living for everyone, and work to ensure that all could attain this level.

An editor might suggest to make the wording more clear and specific: Replace “try to avoid” with “avoid” and “seek to preserve” with “preserve” or perhaps “take action to preserve.” It is tempting to generalize that some of the BYM queries, being crafted from two different traditions of Quakerism, are so bland as to offend no one; yet they provide an opportunity for reflection about right action. Nevertheless, they are our discipline; they outline the dimensions of a life lived in obedience to the light of Truth.

The Queries are found in ‘Faith and Practice, so named because it provides guidelines for putting faith into practice. There are references to “Humankind and the Environment” on p.33 and “Civic Responsibility” on p.30(BYM, p. 30-33).

Under Civic Responsibility, we find comments on the need for members to “bear their share of responsibilities of government” with cheerfulness as recorded by the Elders at Balby in 1656 in their proclamation of the peace testimony.

Under Humankind and the Environment, the issues of population growth and technological abuses are mentioned, with no specific positions or viewpoints given.

References

Jacobs, Jane, 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House

Baltimore Yearly Meeting (BYM), 1988. Faith and Practice of Baltimore Yearly Meeting of the Religious Society of Friends. Sandy Spring MD: BYM, approved at Yearly Meeting sessions, 1988.

London Yearly Meeting (LYM; now Britain Yearly Meeting), 1960. Christian Faith and Practice in the experience of the Society of Friends. Richmond IN: Friends United Press. Approved by Yearly Meeting, 1959.

Parsons, Talcott,1960. Structure and Process in Modern Societies. New York: Free Press.

Philadelphia Yearly Meeting (PYM), 1998. Faith and Practice: a book of Christian Discipline. Philadelpha PA: PYM, adopted 1955.