A few days ago, in an interview about
Bargaining for Eden, the reporter's last question was: "What do you want the impact of your book to be?"
I know what the impact was on me. Weaving together these stories has been my greatest challenge as a writer ? to integrate the historical context, the characters, the journalistic tracking down of details, the greater implications on policy, and my own literary voice into something that really works as a piece of writing.
Contemplating these stories has made me a more effective citizen. Sure, I can still be a fierce advocate when government or developers go too far. But I'm more respectful of local knowledge. I keep looking for ways to stand together with people who tend to dismiss me and my second-home-owner cohort as newcomers irrelevant to the "real" community. There's just got to be a way for ranchers and environmentalists to realize that they share more than they think, that both groups treasure many of the same experiences in wild country.
Cattle drive through Capitol Reef National Park, Utah.
(Photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
How about the impact on my readers?
Some writers are pure storytellers. They seek no further impact beyond the tales they skillfully tell to readers. I admit to being as much interpreter as storyteller. I'm gathering stories with a need to make sense of them ? for myself and my readers.
The stakes are high. I chose a quote from Thoreau as the epigraph for my book: "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it."
What are the costs in Thoreauvian "life" of each conflicting dream for the North American landscape? How do we make our bargains about shrinking open space? How does an engaged citizen affect the course of change? I became convinced that the answer is pretty simple. We've got to keep talking, no matter what. We've got to keep listening, no matter what.
These issues of ownership and power circulate everywhere in our culture. There really is a battle raging over the land ? and the soul ? of America. I hope readers will apply the lessons of these stories from Utah to their home landscapes.
Gale and Haynes Fuller ? farmers, storytellers, and citizens in Eden, Utah.
(Photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
I believe that community dialogue, reciprocity, and common ground exist; that we can break the angry standoff between longtime villagers and newcomers; that we must do so or the forces that threaten the open spaces we all cherish will steamroll our communities. Locals and move-ins in rural America are both disenfranchised, and we need to stand around on Main Street and talk and kick the tires and listen and kick the tires some more until we find that common ground.
Bargaining for Eden is about the one-sided impact of power on relationships ? between individuals, within communities, and between people and the land. But I'm not out to demonize the powerful. As Martin Luther King Jr. said at the end of the Montgomery bus boycott, we are here to "fulfill the American Dream, not condemn it."
My sympathies lie with the land, but this is not a diatribe.
I'm too much a part of the story for that. I don't become a character just to theoretically acknowledge the old line, "We have met the enemy, and he is us." What happened was much more startlingly personal: I became a land developer on a tiny scale, I became the enemy.
The author's contractor framing the view from the bedroom window, Torrey, Utah.
(Photo © 2008 by Stephen Trimble)
So here is what I hope the impact of my book will be. I will be delighted if the outcomes of these stories and relationships distress and unsettle my readers. I also hope they find intrigue and solace here. I'm asking for mindfulness about landscape, and that means we will disagree. Only then will we generate enough passion to engage, to keep the conversation going.
I conclude on a note of hope with a Credo, a condensed guide for citizens and communities seeking to reinvent their relationship with our beloved American landscape. The Credo sums up what I've learned while trying to connect the dots between conversation, conservation, and citizenship.
My Credo doesn't tie up everything in a perfectly neat package. The relationship between American culture and landscape is a work in progress. There is no founding document to guide us along the evolving ethical continuum between private property and public land. This is our job: to find an organizing window into community decision-making, a vision that saves our most precious open space.