Joseph L. Kagle, Jr. Essays

Where Do You Live?

I Live Somewhere Between the Peaceable Kingdom and Where My Granddaughter Lives!

In a recent work for Rotary Global History, Part Eight of the Peace Journey, using a beloved Ming hand scroll collected 33 years ago as the vehicle for starting that virtual trip, I discussed how Paul Harris and other leaders in the first half of the 20^th century came out of a “nature-based” idea of what peace might be. Their education of a Classical/Romantic nature re-enforced this concept. As a Rotarian, I come out of that same tradition, being educated in a rural view of what Peace might be: isolation in an ideal natural setting. You cannot be educated with the Hudson River School of painting, Frederick Church, the lore of the West (Remington and Ryder) and the “Peaceable Kingdom” of Bingham without being influenced by this vision of what world peace might include. Our trip with the Ming Dynasty hand scroll shows that the Chinese also saw peace in terms of open spaces, lakes and rivers, mountains and shelters, and some spiritual destination (not an organized religious destination but certainly in a generic sense, “spiritual”). Here the West and the East come together for a vision of idealistic PEACE.

I was schooled the same way, although I grew up in the center of a large city, Pittsburgh. You might then call me, “street smart”, although not “worldly”. My education, though, was based on images of open spaces (“Go West, Young Man”). John Wayne was one of my heroes. I knew everything a teenager needed to know about the world: code of the West, white hats win over black hats, tip your hat to Miss Kitty, and take care of your horse. In Pittsburgh, it was “live fast, die young and have a good looking corpse” so I knew that that was not for me. I looked West but choose the East of the pilgrims. When I had the chance to go to college, the decision was narrowed between two scholarships: the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts, situated in the middle of another large city, or Dartmouth College, nestled in the New Hampshire mountains in a small town, Hanover, with a miniscule population and the emphasis on man as part of the environment (Hanover was a village surrounded by nature). The Dartmouth College experience influenced many of my job and living decisions for over 50 years. I, like many others of my age and time, were not ready for a world where “nature was surrounded by cities” and “technology would supplant nature”.

Recently I moved from the smallish city of Waco, Texas to the metropolitan giant of Houston, Texas, and where did we decide to live in the Houston area? We looked all over and finally decided that Kingwood, Texas was for us. And what is Kingwood called? “The Livable Forest”, a place where each group of houses is planned so that nature divides them and greenways with walks are the norm instead of the exception. I am still in the New Hampshire forests and lakes, just as Paul Harris was conditioned in all his visions for Rotary by his Vermont boyhood and upbringing. Robert Frost was the poet in residence at Dartmouth College and each student knew by heart, “Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though…” We read Walden’s Pond as a stable of freshman English. America itself was influenced by a nature mentality with the Pilgrims settling in New England (with an emphasis on the word “New”). Every commercial on television today (products sold must be “new” and “different”) still has a tie to the land, the waters and the mountains (whether it is for an automobile, clean cloths, real estate, a necessary, not-to-be-without product, or a service). Or maybe with my education and background, I notice those elements in commercials more than others.

In the Rotary eClub that I just joined, in the Forum where members comment and share with one another (in a particular section called Image Association), most of the shots are of desert islands, open interiors of churches, beaches and water, idealized sunsets, and other nature images. We are not conscious of how much our generational education is influenced still by “nature” learning.

But it is changing, I am afraid. I watch my grand daughter spent hours before her television, computer and play station. As the concerned grandfather, I ask: “How are you?” and she answers, “I just made level seven.” I do admit that the adventures that she must overcome are pictured mostly in natural environments in a virtual world. Even people my age (I am now 74) who work out at the YMCA (which is nestled in a grove of trees with nature all around and some large windows in the workout room to see this beauty) are leaning away from their education of nature. There are ten stationary bikes that look onto seven television sets which have six shows of news and one of sports. Of the forty-eight (48) stair-step machines and treadmills behind the bikes, forty-four (44) face the television screens and only four (4) face the windows where you can see the outside trees and lust green.  Those four are the last to fill up during peak time of workout. This is not a scientific study but an observation of part of the place where I live.

Speaking about the news, I also noticed that when the war in Iraq was planned, it was meticulously studied and prepared for from the air. Our air war was an immediate success because we could plan that by computers and parallax vision from satellites. It was only when the ground war started did America come upon unforeseen obstacles. Nature does not always conform to computer print outs. Our planning leaders had forgotten their Classical/Romantic education. America did not have a Lawrence of Arabia for guidance (someone who lived in that nature and understood it).

I am a Rotarian therefore I live today in my nature-oriented (Paul Harris) education AND my observational experience of “now” in the 21^st century. I worry that too many see the world only from the skies and do not look around at the earth (Nature) that formed us. If we do not take the natural world into our hearts (meaning into the cities) then we might lose that bedrock of what this world was built upon. It is happening to a small degree where the affluent can afford (like “The Livable Forest”) but in the heart of the cities it is not there (except for parks which are becoming too dangerous to explore, i.e., Central Park in New York). Rotarians have the influence to change this: to bring nature thinking into the equation for survival for the “haves” and the “have-nots”.  If we lose that history of honoring nature, we may lose the future. Rotarian can change our dependence on oil and gasoline, our pollution of our lakes and streams, and the purity of our air. Rotarians must help to curtail war. All service action is good business, using our motto of “Service Above Self”. We should have a green education. We should listen to and perform the words and deeds of leaders like Paul Harris. We know what is a “right action”. What we don’t know is whether there is time to change a trend, a wave of interactions. My granddaughter needs a balance between playing outside, learning through play about the world and playing inside with “Look Grandpa, I reached level eight.”