No one kept score. Scorekeepers stayed home and watched Hawaii beat Cal 77-66, and the San Antonio Spurs trounced the Golden State Warriors 87-79. The Call of the Forest Conference that took place on March 19 in Point Reyes Station wasn’t a contest or a match. No one spoke for logging companies or represented the corporations that eat up forests around the world. Rather, the day offered a series of sobering dispatches from the frontlines of the war against the Earth. The news was bad, but no one urged surrender or acknowledged defeat.
The speakers—call them the daughters of the earth—owe their allegiance not to any single nation, government or organization but to Mother Earth herself. Environmentalists and spiritualists, they spoke with a single, matrilineal voice.
Trees and forests were at the heart of the conference. Baby redwoods sat on stage and shared the spotlight with the speakers. Osprey Orielle Lake ignited the crowd of about 225 when she observed, “The earth will survive, but humanity might not endure this existential crisis.” The founder and president of The Women’s Earth and Climate Caucus, she stormed the Paris summit on climate change last December, came back and regrouped after she collapsed, she said, from sheer exhaustion.
In March, Lake traveled to Ecuador to celebrate International Women’s Day and protest the extraction of oil. “We need to have new earth laws,” she said. She added that women are more intensely affected by climate change than men and that “we need to move nature out of the marketplace.”
Linda Sheehan sat on the same panel. A lawyer and the director of Earth Law Center, Sheehan touted grassroots change from below and ridiculed the notion of progressive legislation from above. “We are living a lie,” she said. “Everything we do exasperates global warming.” Sheehan reminded the audience that Governor Jerry Brown insisted on the eve of the Paris summit that “friendship, beauty, art has to take the place of this heavy commodification of our entire existence.” She added, “We have to have our elected officials stand by their words.”
The day began and ended with a blessing by Joanne Campbell, an elder in the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. A Lake County native and self-described product of the Great Depression, Campbell explained that her parents, who spent their early years at the Olompali Rancheria, had kept silent about her Indian heritage. As an adult she turned to activism and has since devoted her life to transmitting ancient Indian ways to the next generation.
Wendy Johnson set the tone for the event on Saturday morning when she urged conference attendees “to sit still, slow down, listen, be mindful and embrace the circle of gratitude.” A founder of the organic farm and garden program at Green Gulch Zen Center, she urged audience members to “hold great grief and sorrow.” She said that from Jan. 30, the date of Gandhi’s assassination, to April 4, the date of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination, is “a sacred time” and “the season of non-violence” when humans might “hear the sound of the earth crying out.”
Diana Beresford-Kroeger, who was born in England in 1944 and came of age in Ireland, amplified and extended the chords that Johnson sounded. Often described as “the E.O. Wilson of Canada,” she said that “a tree isn’t just a tree” and that “trees are the secret to our existence.”
Women’s voices clearly rose above those of men. The one exception was Brock Dolman, co-founder of the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center and co-director of the Water Institute; his riff on water brought down the house and added a note of levity to the occasion. “Brock means badger,” he explained. “I will badger you with water.” He summed up his philosophy of water with the mantra “slow it, spread it, sink it and share it” and added that humans ought to ask water what it wants and needs.
He explained that northern California was midway between the rain forests of Canada and the deserts of Mexico, and that while storms delivered an abundance of water, humans didn’t store it wisely.
The afternoon session belonged in large part to Mary Evelyn Tucker, a professor at Yale and a Catholic who brought both a sense of religiosity and a global perspective. Explicitly political, Tucker explained that she left the U.S. for Japan when Nixon was elected and came back after he resigned. “We are in a great crisis, the greatest we have gone through as a species. To survive we need a fusion of science and religion,” she said.
Pam Ferrari and her able crew from Custom Catering cooked a feast that included pork tacos, Marin Sun Farms chicken-wing drumettes and crostini with ricotta and beets, prosciutto and eggs (donated by Kitty Dolcini). Point Reyes Books, owned and operated by Kate Levinson and Steve Costa, sponsored the event.
Kyra Epstein, Commonweal’s communications manager and the coordinator for the New School, attended the conference and, days later, still sang its praises. “I looked around the room and felt proud to know that so many were doing so much: activism and service work, education about earth issues, and the very important job of holding the forest in our hearts and minds,” she wrote in an email. “I felt the soul of all forests there, and the quiet presence of our West Marin forest all around.”
Jonah Raskin is the author of “A Terrible Beauty: The Wilderness of American Literature” and a frequent visitor to Point Reyes. He lives in Santa Rosa.