Keynote Address by William Dietrich

Attention Must Be Paid: Witnessing Our Changing Environment

2005 Humanities Washington Award
in honor of Ruth Kirk
Washington State History Museum,
Tacoma, Washington
October 14, 2005

The title of my talk is "Attention Must Be Paid," a tribute to the demand made in the play "Death of a Salesman" by Willy Loman's wife, Linda. "Attention must be paid," she cries to insist on the validation of an ordinary man's struggling life in our overcrowded, impersonal, and frenetic world.

Paying attention, it seems to me, has also been a central message of nature, science and history writers, from Aldo Leopold to Barry Lopez, and from John Muir to David Quammen. Paying attention has been a life work of Ruth Kirk, and it's an honor for me to have a hand in honoring her, a woman remarkable for her multi-faceted eloquence, careful accuracy, productivity, and modesty.

I would be remiss if I did not additionally mention the author's remarkable energy, as cited by Sylvia Youngberg in an article she is preparing about Ruth. I'm always intrigued by stories of the hardiness of the pioneers, and remember reading one early account of settlers who decided to picnic at Snoqualmie Pass by walking there from Seattle - and not just walking, but carrying a watermelon all the way!

I suspect such an expedition wouldn't faze Ruth Kirk, who has not only climbed Mount Rainier, but who climbed it carrying a sack of cement to help put a new elevation marker on top.

Ruth has already won so many awards - at least two dozen - that I'm flattered tonight that she's even shown up. Certainly she has an enviable seniority in these proceedings. When I was told Ruth was the 2005 recipient of the Humanities Washington award, I had two reactions perhaps not untypical of her fans across the western United States.

The first was, "You mean she hasn't won it already?"

And the second, "Ruth Kirk is still alive?"

It seemed to me that Ruth Kirk had been writing books for as long as I could remember. Then I looked at her resume and realized that Ruth has been writing books for as long as I could remember, since 1954, when I was three years old. She has written 37 books, written and produced 12 films or videos, supplemented her writing with still photography, and produced countless articles for newspapers and magazines, about both the natural and human world. Her work has been on library and bookstore shelves as long as I can remember. She's also taught and served on numerous boards and committees.

Ruth has been at the professional writing game so long - about 55 years - that when I was attending high school at Tacoma's Mount Tahoma, Ruth was producing films for my school district! I probably watched them!

(And if she's the one responsible for the grainy film strips we had to watch in Health Class, she has a lot to answer for.)

She is, in the very best sense of the term, our village elder. In fact, Ruth Kirk has not only written brilliantly to help save old growth forest, she is well on her way to qualifying as one of its matriarchs.

Which brings me to ancient Egypt.

I recently toured Egypt to research a novel, and like many visitors I felt myself sinking into almost unbelievable depths of history and antiquity. Egypt is so venerable that when the ancient Greek historian Herodotus visited, the pyramids were already older to him than the Roman Coliseum is to us. At first approach this antiquity can seem alien, the art stiff, and the animal-headed gods kind of creepy.

With familiarity, however, the people of ancient Egypt seem increasingly like us. They wrote poems about love. The expressions on their statuary of everyday people are startlingly familiar. Their tomb paintings depict everyday life of work, play, and a love of nature not dissimilar to our own. The animal heads on their gods begin to seem not weird and pagan, but a delightful fusion of animal and human, reminiscent of the animal characters of Northwest Indian legend. These were a people transfixed by the stars, dependent on the annual cycle of the Nile, and intimate with nature.

The Egyptians also believed that the written word was magic. I don't mean magic in the metaphorical sense we would use today. Rather it could literally serve as love potion, cure an illness, or avert a famine. Only a tiny percentage of the population was literate and the job of the literate was to intercede with the gods. To know, and write, the name of a god was to summon it. To write an instruction book for life after death was to ensure successful negotiation of a dangerous underworld. Any writer has to find this confidence in the power of words to be charming.

One is hypnotized by their world…and then one emerges from the temples and museums into the noise and brightness of modern Egypt. Here is a nation where civilization has persisted, unbroken, for more than 5,000 years. Here is the world's most peculiar geography, a nation as large as France of which 96.4 percent is uninhabitable desert. As a result some 70 to 80 million people live on a strip of irrigated greenery along the Nile that is about one-seventh the size of Washington State. This gives Egypt a population density nearly 80 times that of ours.

What this means is that while Egypt persists, the Egypt of the pharaohs does not. There is a lion-headed goddess named Sekhmet, but no lions prowl Egypt anymore. There is an Ibis-headed god named Thoth, the origin of our word for "thought," but the Ibis has been extinct in Egypt for 200 years. There is a crocodile-headed god named Sobek, but no crocodiles remain below the High Dam at Aswan. There is a so-called "botanical garden" at Karnak that consists of stone carvings of Egyptian plants and animals, but the landscape today is of domesticated crops. The dam itself, while saving Egypt from disastrous drought and flood, has also raised the water table so much throughout the nation that low-lying monuments hundreds of miles downstream are flooding.

Yes, Egypt survives, and in terms of human numbers is more successful than ever. It still has beauty that takes you by surprise. But Egypt as a place where the human and natural worlds coexist - where the natural environment was sustained for thousands of years - has largely disappeared. It has been swamped by human numbers. Cairo has an estimated 13 million people, or more than New York.

This is the grim lesson that the world's oldest country has for us here in the Pacific Northwest, one of the world's newest. Just 250 years ago - a blink in Egyptian history - our state wasn't even on European maps. We were a complete blank. Today there are nearly 7 million of us (Washington adds about 80,000 to 90,000 people a year) and we have utterly transformed most of the natural landscape. If today's pace of growth remains unbroken, we will approach Egypt's density of population in 500 years, not 5,000.

Let me quote from "The Olympic Rain Forest," a book Ruth Kirk co-authored with forest scientist Jerry Franklin. "Today the need is to balance human sustenance with the well being of fellow life-forms and the earth we all share. To do this we need to regain the essence of what we felt when we believed in the animistic gods. Scientific understanding rekindles that awe. It explains much and points toward even more. It gives insight into normalcy. It enhances aesthetic appreciation."

Let me repeat her words: "Scientific understanding rekindles that awe." To me, that sums up the essence of Ruth Kirk's achievement, to rekindle our awe through making us understanding what it is we have, and by implication what we are losing. In book after book, article after article, film after film, she has taken us from Mount Rainier to Death Valley, from First Nations history to the glaciers of Alaska. She has made a record of a world we thought we could never lose, but which in fact is disappearing. It is impossible to imagine the Northwest as crowded as Egypt, but let's give it a few centuries.

Unless we pay attention.

Compared to the 4.6 billion year history of Planet Earth, our species has been on the scene an incredibly short time. If we reduce the earth's history to a 24-hour day, plants and animals did not appear on land until 9 p.m., or after 21 of those 24 hours had already passed. The dinosaurs don't show up until 11 p.m., and only went extinct just 20 minutes before midnight. Our own species shows up in only the last two seconds of that 24 hour day. Civilization occupies the last tenth of a second, and our own lives the last thousandth of a second.

This is our individual occupancy: one one-thousandth of one second of our planet's 24-hour history.

As Mark Twain supposedly remarked, to suggest that all that earth history ran solely for our benefit (and exploitation) is like suggesting the Eiffel Tower was erected to support the paint at its top.

Like all of us, Ruth Kirk's lifetime is brief. Yet Washington State has been remade in her lifetime. All the big dams. All the irrigation. Most of the harvest of old growth forest. Over-fishing of salmon runs. Freeways, skyscrapers, Boeing, Microsoft, Hanford, a quadrupling of population. She photographed the Paradise Ice Caves before global warming helped melt them away. She has been witness to the most tumultuous period of change in human history. Never has science and technology advanced no quickly. Never have wars been so great, genocide so horrific, art so explosive, and the gulf between generations so vast. Never has there been so much spiritual, moral, and gender debate and confusion. Consider the changing role of women in the 80 years since Ruth was born, a change in which she was a pioneer. Her life - our life - has been of continuing scientific, technological, and social revolution.

In such a dizzy world, so different from the stability of ancient Egypt, what constitutes a good and proper life? How should we conduct ourselves?

One idea is to use our lives to contribute to the lives of the creatures around us, to sustain the marvelous natural world we inherited. One idea is to preserve human memory, as this museum does. Ruth Kirk is a living example of both.

Ruth has championed not just nature, but explored the Japanese land ethic, preservation of the Scottish countryside, Indian fishing rights, the issue of whether abandoned totem poles should be preserved or left to rot, and how the car can put us in touch with Washington history. She has documented the exploration of Ozette Village. She has given written voice to Native Americans, and children's lives in Japan or Mexico. She has spent a lifetime paying attention.

As such, she has enriched our lives and our region again and again. She has given us Northwesterners a true sense of place.

Now we writers are entering an era of unsettling change. The reading population is aging. Nearly half of all books are bought by people age 55 or over. Two out of three Americans have never been in a bookstore, and half never read a book after high school. Newspaper circulation is in decline even as population soars: baby boomers are a third less likely to read newspapers than Ruth's generation, and Generations X and Y are a third less likely than boomers. As few as one third of Americans subscribe to a newspaper.

As Gore Vidal remarked, "Half of the American people have never read a newspaper. Half have never voted for President. One hopes it is the same half."

There is an explosion of information, but its traditional disseminators are splintering into more and more voices and mediums, and mutating from words to graphic. We are becoming a picture society, giving up our own imagination to Hollywood special effects. Ruth Kirk is interesting in that she recognized the power of pictures early on, and succeeded in both the written and photographic worlds. I don't know if she wished the current revolution, but she has adapted to it, and for that, too, she should be saluted.

Much of what is going is marvelous. When I recently wanted information on flintlock firearms, I not only found an article on Daniel Boone's gun on the Internet within minutes, but it was an article excerpted from a 1923 book it is unlikely I ever would have found. Suddenly the old and obscure is available again. Books of mine that disappeared from store shelves years ago can be readily found on Amazon. Citizens who were voiceless can suddenly post an opinion. Letters than took days and a stamp can now be sent instantly, via e-mail. The protest of people dying in New Orleans can be instantly conveyed to my living room. Literature has new shelf life. My prediction is that the Information Revolution is going to give a certain electronic immortality to Ruth's words that they might otherwise never have had.

At the same time, however, there is a growing cacophony of noise that impedes understanding, that prevents us from paying attention. There's only so much time in the day, and if you're spending it downloading music for your I-Pod, or using your cell phone to watch "Desperate Housewives," you're probably not paying much attention to the natural world and the accelerating pace of change.

This is an immense challenge for the newspaper and book industries of which I'm a part, and frankly it has me, and the people I work for, somewhat baffled. There's a revolution in choice and in forms of information delivery that we content providers are all struggling to come to grips with. Will the next Ruth Kirk be able to carve out a similar, splendid career, or will her voice be drowned out in an eruption of blogs, talk radio screeds, and chat rooms? Can we recognize those among us who have the gift of paying attention? Or will they be shoved aside by a babble of trivia, of quick-cut editing and flashy graphics that exist for graphics' sake? This is not an issue for Ruth, who has done her share, but it is an issue for Humanities Washington.

There are times in human history when art has been paramount, times when spirituality is paramount, and times when politics have been paramount. We live in a time when science dominates. We live in an age of science and technology in which scientists and engineers are the real priests, a time of domination by professions that by their very training do not ask why, but rather how. They pursue progress for the sake of progress, for better and worse. Damn the consequences, full speed ahead! As a result they've doubled the average human lifespan. They've also invented the bomb. There is something brilliant but barbaric about some of the new technology billionaires, a crass incompletion, a faith that the future is to be found in gadgetry, that delivering information is more important than its content.

The humanities, I believe, are an essential counterweight to this. When Willy Lowman's wife cries that attention must be paid, is she crying not just about the seeming futility of modern life but the need for attention to nuclear weapons, global warming, environmental transformation, frenetic lifestyles, and human pointlessness? Is Linda Lowman not asking that we follow the model of Ruth Kirk: to be careful observers, to develop the art of appreciation, to be judicious instead of loudly opinionated, to communicate with children as well as intellectuals, and to pay humble homage to all that is local, heartfelt, and fine?

That is why this Humanities Washington award is so appropriate. Ruth Kirk to me has not just had an exemplary career, she's a symbol of quiet rationality, patient dedication, and what a lifetime of purpose can accomplish. She has found the very best in life, and then shared it with the rest of us.

We leave tonight to go back out into our Brave New World. The challenge for the humanities is to carry the art of paying attention into that world, so that in our frenzied excitement about remaking our planet we don't lose sight of what it is we are losing. Let's not rue the day that stories of Northwest raven and coyote and salmon are just that, stories - about animals as extinct in our state as the sacred ibis is on the shores of the Nile.

Thank you.


Copyright © William Dietrich, 2005.


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