What Spreads Beyond the Place Where It Started?

Sandy Neily here:

Cancer and rampant real estate development. Both are driven by relentless metastasis, a word usually reserved for the spread of cancer.

  Here’s the medical definition: metastasis is when the cancer spreads beyond the place where it started to other areas of the body.

There is no metastasis-like definition for rampant real estate development, but it most often behaves like rampant, out-of-control cancer cells.

Maybe author Edward Abbey says it better when he writes about the loss of our wild world

 “Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey

Casting while bald

This is a hard topic for me. I have also lived with so much loss of the outdoors that sometimes I’m not sure I can write about it in an entertaining way. I want to create a page-turning read and treat readers to what’s compelling, engaging, and mysterious. And I must also infuse an unfamiliar journey made up of a unique plot and unfamiliar places with familiar human emotions and experiences or the story cannot resonate with a potential reader.

Whew.

How to do that? How to connect the cancer we do know from our own or loved ones’ experience with a similar relentless process that, unchecked, can destroy the “body” of our planet— destroy the woods, waters, and wildlife habitat that is essentially our home?

Here’s an excerpt from “Deadly Harvest” (always a work in progress) where Patton, the narrator, returns home only to find the woods has changed.

***************

Something wasn’t right. It was late March and I’d only been away since last fall. I’d walked these woods for over fifty years. No signs warned me about anything except normal animal activity. Turkeys left scratched ground after they’d found insect dinners. Overturned clumps of leaves told me I’d surprised a deer. Torn-up mud holes said a male moose had rolled in female urine to advertise his availability. Pock and I avoided moose-churned mud because horny moose charged any moving thing.

None of these creatures posted No Trespassing signs, nailed up surveillance cameras, or wrapped the woods with bright pink flagging tape.

**************

When I get stuck, I turn to articulate, inspirational voices that shove me forward, encourage me, renew my resolve, help me manage my grief. Yes, there is grief. People all over the world are starting to hold funeral ceremonies for places they have lost. Perhaps most of us carry around memories of loved lost places.

I think my novels may be a call to action as well as an obituary at the same time, but I do have some help.

Some of my helping voices.

“If a man walks in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole day as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making the earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.”
― Henry David Thoreau

“Better a cruel truth than a comfortable delusion.”

“Since we cannot expect truth from our institutions, we must expect it from our writers.”

“Society is like a stew. If you don’t stir it up every once in a while then a layer of scum floats to the top.”

“I stand for what I stand on.”
― Edward Abbey

“To those devoid of imagination, a blank place on the map is a useless waste; to others, the most valuable part.”

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds…”

  Aldo Leopold , A Sand County Almanac: With Other Essays on Conservation from Round River

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost‘s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.”

“The question is whether any civilization can wage relentless war on life without destroying itself, and without losing the right to be called civilized.”

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man.”
― Rachel Carson

“If we kill off the wild, then we are killing a part of our souls.”

“I think my message to the politicians who have within their power the ability to make change is, ‘Do you really, really not care about the future of your great-grandchildren? Because if we let the world continue to be destroyed the way we are now, what’s the world going to be like for your great-grandchildren?’”
Jane Goodall

“Destroying rainforest for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.”

“The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.”
― Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life

“Earth provides enough to satisfy every man’s need, but not every man’s greed.
”

“What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.”
― Mahatma Gandhi

“God has to nearly kill us sometimes, to teach us lessons.”

Margaret is known as the “Grandmother of the Conservation Movement.” Read this book!

“These temple destroyers, devotees of ravaging commercialism, seem to have a perfect contempt for Nature, and, instead of lifting their eyes to the God of the mountains, lift them to the Almighty Dollar.”
― John Muir

“Wilderness itself is the basis of all our civilization. I wonder if we have enough reverence for life to concede to wilderness the right to live on?” –Margaret (Mardy) Murie

“Finding beauty in a broken world is creating beauty in the world we find.”

Our kinship with Earth must be maintained; otherwise, we will find ourselves trapped in the center of our own paved-over souls with no way out.”
Terry Tempest Williams,

 

 

 

Let’s let Edward Abby have the last word here and let’s get out there …

“Devoted though we must be to the conservation cause, I do not believe that any of us should give it all of our time or effort or heart. Give what you can, but do not burn yourselves out — or break your hearts. Let us save at least half of our lives for the enjoyment of this wonderful world which still exists. Leave your dens, abandon your cars and walk out into the great mountains, the deserts, the forests, the seashores. Those treasures still belong to all of us. Enjoy them to the full, stretch your legs, expand your lungs, enliven your hearts — and we will outlive the greedy swine who want to destroy it all in the name of what they call GROWTH.
God bless America — let’s save some of it. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet!”
― Edward Abbey, Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast

ps: Go here to see how much of Maine’s genuine habitat remains (what’s green).  MAINE FOREST EDGE EFFECTS (1)

Sandy’s 2nd Mystery in Maine, Deadly Turn, was published in 2021. Her debut novel, “Deadly Trespass, A Mystery in Maine,” won a national Mystery Writers of America award, was a finalist in the Women’s Fiction Writers Association “Rising Star” contest, and was a finalist for a Maine Literary Award. Find her novels at all Shermans Books (Maine) and on Amazon. Find more info on Sandy’s website.