Dear Land, it’s me Bristol
Land Listening & Placemaking
--
Dear Land, it’s me Bristol.
<Silence>
I’ve arrived! I’m here to listen. Now you.
<Silence>
Argh.
“It may be that our task now, as it has always been, is to listen. Simply that. If we really listen, the land will tell us what it wants, and tell us how we can live more responsively.”
— Terry Tempest Williams, Listening to the Land
Somewhere along the permaculture beat, someone said something about spending the first year on any new piece of land you wish to know, listening and observing. Growing up in a 1700 sq. ft Twinhome in suburban San Diego plus a few intense teenage years in horrifyingly rural New Hampshire, I can safely say no land upon which I have lived, until recently, has been listened to. My interest in placemaking and land listening was a surprising and delightful result of exploring inner space until I realized I was planet earth.
Fresh off reading the books of Eileen Caddy and Ogilvie Crombie, two fluent speakers of nature from Findhorn Eco-village (longest living intentional community), I came to Montana speaking elementary Redwood and ready to commune with the fairies of the forest. Together we will uncover the highest and best expression of this place! “Don’t romanticize me,” was one of the first clear mind-slams I received, pointing my gaze toward the granity ground and out of the clouds.
Unlike the soft, majestic Redwood Trees of Northern California this land feels more reserved, guarded. Like any descendant of a clear cut ancestor, I sense the majority of trees here may be weary of a well-meaning “land listener” with a desire for community. Trust is to be earned. There is a relationship to build.
Land Listening: Fall Silence. Wide open spaces. Flies buzzing and breeding and dying. Yellow, golden, and orange leaves falling. Crunching pine needle land-blanket. Last few cows bellow and munch. Grass and cows thinning. Quaking birch shivers. Early sunset. Early moonrise. Wasps desperate. Wind whoosh through the crowns of the pines. Cider house creaks, shifts. Crack. Sigh. Maple trees lose their yellow clothes.
The Ranch Steward
Jerry Ring, the local “Darbarian” who manages this ranch, became my guide to this place. “So you are going to live here eh? Alone? There are a lot of you you now. Californians. Are you an environmentalist?” Each syllable of the last word ratcheted in disgust. I paused. “I…love nature.” “Very diplomatic answer,” he smiled. Later I learned that Jerry, much like most of his neighbors, had made a great living in the timber industry before “Sierra Club and the west coast environmentalists came in to shut down the industry.” We started with radically different views of the world but, over time, we earned each others’ trust. Jerry kept me stocked in chopped wood and shavings for the stove in winter and taught me how to “drag the fields” (spread out cow manure via 4-wheeler) in spring. I gifted him some fancy chocolate for Christmas and he gave me a small wooden box to store “jewelry and whatever.” As long as we stayed away from chemical fertilizer…Jerry: “When it hits the dirt, it goes inert.” Me: “No! If it sounds like a corporate jingle, it is probably killing the Earth.”
I posted in the Findhorn Facebook group, “why do you think Findhorn remains one of the longest lasting intentional communities in the world?” Multiple people answered, “because it was never intended to be one.” Of course! Findhorn was birthed out of the nightly meditation of Eileen Caddy in a giant coat on a closed toilet seat, while her three kids and husband slept in a tiny caravan. In the first year she built a practice of listening, hours each night, that led her to simple steps to build soil on sandy land in an RV park in Northern Scotland. There was no singular visionary, business plan, or pitch deck. It was the slow, persistent, unfolding of a relationship.
Like every new relationship, my expectations and hidden agendas are the first things to be mirrored back to me here. “Wherever you go, there you are,” I hear myself saying to clients, hearing the land mimic me back to me. What I can hear is the deafening noise of my own longing to feel safe in a shapeshifting world. My experience Mourning Supremacy is sculpting new ears. I projected all of this longing onto the land, wanting desperately to know if this “place” is going to be my home. How will I know?
The Bookstore
As you drive into the nearest town of Darby it starts to feel like the set of a western with wood paneled store fronts, vacant office spaces, and wind-kicked-dust swinging the liquor store sign. Established in 1889 and made famous by the show Yellowstone, Darby is a last outpost before heading into serious wilderness. I poked my head into the local, donation-only bookstore, and was greeted by Juli, the friendly woman behind the counter. She asked where I was from and what brought me to her town of 821 people. “I’m researching regenerative community building and agriculture,” I said. “You have to meet Gina,” she said enthusiastically and looked out the window and there, crossing the street, (no joke) was Gina. Juli popped her head out, “Gina!”
Gina, it turns out, is an Environmental Engineer with an MBA focused on cooperative community business models. When she heard why I was here she said, “you have to meet Laura Garber. She is hosting an event about regenerative agriculture on Zoom later this week.” Laura runs a non-profit, Cultivating Connections on an organic farm in Hamilton (the town 20 min. away).
Facebook post > Analise Roland > Montana > Como Orchards (the land)> Darby > Bookstore > Juli > Gina > Laura (Regenerative community builder).
Laura is doing the work y’all. She has spent 17 years in Hamilton putting down roots, regenerating soil, feeding her community, and offering paid internships for young people to learn how to grow their own organic food. She is mostly vegetarian and serious about farm to school lunch. She and her German husband walk their talk lightly on the planet. She is my kryptonite, someone to compare my “goodness” to and fail miserably. It is with her, I spend the next 8 months learning about seed saving, kneeling in the dirt, running a farmer’s market stand, grant writing, hosting events for local community to learn about regenerative agriculture, and co-creating a leadership workshop for locals to dive deep into the work of MIT lecturer Otto Scharmer via the Presencing Institute.
The Bitterroot Valley
Slowly, this 200 acre ranch on the bench of the rocky Bitterroot-Selway Mountains at approximately 4200 ft., started to extend beyond the property line, the neighborhood, town, and into the 99 miles valley of the Bitterroot lifeshed. I reached out to the weary elders of the environmental movement in the valley, those who had struggled for decades to protect this place from extractive industry. The people who put Jerry out of a job. I felt the growing tension between the flood of people coming from outside to buy up farmland to build housing developments, giant ranches for their own valley view bunker, and the locals who can no longer afford to live here. I was somewhere in between.
I connected with the Executive Director of the Bitterroot Land Trust, Gavin Ricklefs, who is focused on helping ranching families put their properties under conservation easements, legally binding protections from future development. I asked him if he was ever consulted by real estate developers before developing a property, “Don’t they want to know how to build with land and wildlife in mind?” I was new and adorable. He loved the question and admitted it was rarely, if ever, asked. “Why the F not?!” Screams my inner Greta Thunberg. It is so clear that all of the resources we need to create regenerative, resilient, self-reliant communities exist. All the solutions are already here.
“Ecological design begins with the intimate knowledge of a particular place. Therefore, it is small-scale and direct, responsive to both local conditions and local people. If we are sensitive to the nuances of place, we can inhabit without destroying.” — Van der Ryn & Cowan
Cobey Williamson, founder of BitterrootValley.org and co-creator of Building a Stronger Bitterroot, has written extensively on the circular economy potential of the Bitterroot Valley. We have spent hours with neighbor, Dr. Richard P. Donovan, PhD, Assistant Director of Research Development for Sustainable Smart Manufacturing at UC Irvine, who has submitted a robust “Bitterroot Resiliency Plan” for an Economic Development Agency grant. Reminds me of Naomi Klein’s brilliant book, Shock Doctrine, that proved “when crisis occurs, the actions taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.” The crisis and ideas are here. The question will be whose ideas are most strategically placed to be picked up and by whom?
Bio-regional regeneration depends on the personal transformation of each one of us and especially those in positions of power and access to resources. It will take a shift in what we value from extractive wealth to community connection and resilience. I have been blown away by the highly educated, recent college graduates quitting their San Francisco tech jobs and choosing to work on a farm. When the ideas of people like Laura Garber, Cobey Williamson, and Richard Donovan are prioritized, lifted up, and funded by county, state, and federal agencies as well as other seasonal Bitterroot Valley residents (or their descendents) like Charles and Helen Schwab and Barbara and Craig Barrett (former CEO of Intel), this place may become a shining model of what is possible for surviving a volatile and shifting climate.
I can feel the seduction of solutions in what I just wrote above as though I’ve figured it out. x + y = yay! I mean yes, do it, let’s make decisions in service to each other and the planet and see what happens. And there is clearly a deeper mystery at play, a multitude of worldviews making this dynamic fraught, tense, and bouncing between righteous perspectives on “solutions.” Findhorn never set out to be a model of intentional community. It was the result of listening, practice, and relationship building between human and non-human. Phew. I default to the former perspective with rubber band snappiness. What was I doing again? Oh yeah. Listening.
From the series: Following the Regenerative Rabbit.
I work with executives, entrepreneurs and storytellers to connect to their confidence, passion, and purpose, in private 1:1 leadership coaching sessions. Want to discover what makes you come alive, and and how to lean into it? Sign up for coaching sessions, designed to meet you where you are in your journey. Online or in-person intensives in the Azores, Portugal.
