What Can I Do?

At NatureCulture® we believe that everyone has it in them to help the world become a better place. You do not have to solve everything all by yourself. If everyone works at the intersection of what they are passionate about; what they are reasonably good at; and what needs to be done——-this will all add up. This page is a new effort to collect some answers to the question “What Can I Do?” —-especially if what you love is Land.

You probably have heard that those who have time give time, those with money give money—-both are valuable, but where to donate your resources? Below I start with an outline of NatureCulture® and Writing the Land, and then feature some organizations I find to be good partners doing good work…..

What can I do? Feature: Writing the Land

Not that I want to be a feature, but no one else volunteered to go first. Here’s a version of the story of how I found my niche:

Before Writing the Land, there was Thinking the Land. Enjoyable, but not quite efficacious. In my off-grid cottage in a mature hemlock forest in western Massachusetts, for years I contemplated the land. And as I walked those wooded acres, feeling Robert Frost's cadences in my hiking feet, I knew that words and land wrote each other. And it occurred to me, that in this way land contributes to its own protection; that land speaks, and further, that Nature poets are trained to hear those voices. 

So what does it matter, this conversation, asked the activist in me? In a time when land needs all the help it can get just to avoid being clear-cut or paved over, how can poets help the land that we love protect itself? The answer, as it so often is in Nature, is to cooperate with partners. Land Trusts, as conservers of land, bring our writing into action. By pairing poets with protected lands, we offer ourselves as conduits for the land to speak, to sing, to cry out, to comfort. The Writing the Land project produced our first anthology in 2021 (published by Human Error Publishing). It was comprised of 11 land trusts, 36 separate lands, and 40 poets helping the voices of the land translate into acts of protection and care. Our anthologies follow the model of each land trust having 1 chapter in the anthology, which is offered for sale through the land trusts to benefit the work they do. In 2022 NatureCulture® took over publishing as well as editing, and there were 42 land trusts and over 180 poets in 4 anthologies, 2023 also has 4 anthologies, 2024 has two nationwide and two specialized anthologies, and 2025 is forming with 1 complete book for Washington state, 1 in conjunction with partners in New York, and a few other surprises. We currently have over 150 land conservation partners and 350 poets; we are growing every day.  

I am honored to be doing this essential work. I don’t think I would have thought of joining with land trusts except that when my home was threatened by a pipeline, our local land trust, Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust, stepped forward to protect lands. I hope it doesn’t take such a drastic threat to nudge everyone toward action, and if you have no time for action, to giving to others working in areas you believe in. There will be more featured projects soon. In the meantime, I invite you to join us by exploring our website and enjoying the poetry; buying and reading the anthology; donating to your local land trust or to us; enrolling as a poet in our project; or by hiring one of our speakers for your next event (use the form to Contact Us). Thank you for listening, protecting, and respecting the land.

---Lis McLoughlin, PhD; Director of Writing the Land

What Can I Do? Feature: AgArts

What is AgArts and what is its mission? AgArts is a nonprofit designed to imagine and promote a healthy food system through the arts.  We are based in collectives throughout both rural and urban areas in the U.S. where we help fund and support artistic projects that envision better ways to grow and consume our food.

Who are we? We are a group of artists, farmers, and gardeners, and community members who are exploring the connection between agriculture and the arts. We are musicians, theatre, visual, literary, and movement artists. We are chefs, horticulturists, family farmers and beginning farmers. We are all joining together to create a bond among ourselves, and to educate the public about the benefits of sustainable agriculture.

What kinds of projects have we supported in the past? Through donations, we’ve supported theatrical performances about immigrant farmers, Slow Music festivals on CSA farms, a touring rural women’s apron exhibit, an on-farm visual art and writing project with at-risk youth, an archive of the botanical drawings of George Washington Carver and more. . .

What are we sponsoring right now? Our recent projects include online classes and Mary Swander’s Buggy Land podcasts.

Foremost are our farm-to-artist residencies, where artists do their imaginative work while connecting with an agricultural community in the States. We’ve sponsored painters, dancers, visual artists of all kinds, and writers. Get involved and help us sustain these endeavors at: www.agarts.org.

Contact Information: Mary Lynch Swander, Swander Woman Productions, Artistic Director, AgArts, Executive Director swandermary@gmail.com www.maryswander.com www.agarts.org mary swander.substack.com https://iowawriters.substack.com/ (Mobile) 319-936-0187 (Office)   319-683-2613

Feature: Jon Cannon, environmental lawyer and poet, contemplating What Does Nature Writing Do?

This presentation from the 2023 Authors and Artists Festival: Rewilding features Writing the Land poet and environmental law professor emeritus Jon Cannon. He outlines some of the work that environmental writing (poetry and prose, fiction and non-fiction) does, and some of what it doesn’t do.

About his talk, Jon writes: “What can nature writing do? Can nature writing influence political and economic decisions to protect or exploit nature? And if it can, how? Nature writing has a distinguished pedigree, from William Bartram and Henry Thoreau through Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold and Edward Abbey to a host of current authors – Terry Tempest Williams, Robert MacFarlane, Amy Irvine and Drew Lanham, to name a few. Now that I’ve probably offended by leaving your favorites off my list, my goal is to offer a personal reflection on the effect of nature writing from the perspective of someone who has worked in environmental law and policy. What do our respective experiences say about the relationship between word and action in this setting – about the shifts in public attitudes or values that are sometimes necessary to meet major environmental challenges? Percy Bysshe Shelley – perhaps himself a nature writer – wrote that poets are the “unacknowledged legislators of the world.”  Was he right?”

Feature: An Artivism Niche Story by CMarie Fuhrman

There is a place along the South Fork of the Salmon River, just below the breach of an oxbow where Phoebe and Camp Creek meet the great water that will become the Salmon River, the Clearwater, and eventually the Columbia, and, when reaching the Pacific will offer passage home to the Salmon People, that I know as home. It is tucked in beneath pine where I have found arrowheads and effigies and watched a passing wolf. Here, I have seen the past through Native eyes and sign, I have seen the past of logging and mining, and I have seen what the present can do to heal the future. It is here, in Arrowleaf or autumn rain, that I am most alive. 

And perhaps that is why that when I am in this place, where I often spend weeks at a time in my small camper with only dogs and books, that I do my best writing. It is the confluence of all I am. And at this bend I feel most inspired and perhaps the most urgency to protect that which I love. All things come together where the South Fork of the Salmon bends beneath the Jakey Creek bridge. It is, I suppose, my niche.

And though I am careful to never fully auger in at my camp, just as I can never fully commit to one way of writing or one subject or genre, this place, both physical and spiritual, influences every bit of writing I do. In my writing, which is not separate from my life, there is and perhaps will always be the urgency to protect the land, water, and beings. My words come from a mixed ethnicity, Native and white, and will always be influenced by my culture identity and want to influence a deeper understanding in the reader. And, I suppose that there is little in nature that is more lyrical to me than wild sound. Water over rocks, water rushing, rain. Wolf howls and Ruby Crowned Kinglet song. Sway of Larch, sway of hillside hips into deep blue sky. Nature teaches me this music and so poetry, too, and both live and will live in my work and words.

It took me a long time to find this place. Rather, I should say, I had to live for a few decades to find this bend in the river that was all I have become. And, too, that which my soul wanted to write for. Once I found it though, there was no time needed to know this was my place. This is my place and where, for now, I come from. A beautiful note: it has been a camp for over 10,000 years! Isn’t that interesting? Some places just feel right for staying in. And though it is not right for everyone, as we each need to find our own place, our own confluence, there is room here. My little camper doesn’t take up much space. So there is room here for you, too. 

I mean this, of course, in many ways. There is room for you as a reader, a writer, and a friend. There is also room for you to investigate what inspires me, to help you find that place that you want to dedicate your spirit to. We could talk about it over a small campfire. Or beside the river. Or maybe, from here, we can share poems and stories or merely watch as the storm rolls in over Miners Peak and clears off to the blue sky, that empyrean that, no matter where we are, is home to us both. CMarieFuhrman.com

An Art Installation for the Trees

NORTHFIELD, MA MAY 15, 2024--Residents of Northfield, MA and surrounding towns have witnessed a massacre of trees. Trees on the borders of lands, along roads---often hundreds of years old maples, pines, oaks, and other trees, are being cut down wholesale by those who falsely believe this will make their power lines "safe." People with this mindset do not understand that trees grow in relationship with one another. Cut down an old tree on the edge of a forest, and all the trees nearby are weaker because they have grown in ways that depend on the shelter of that tree. In short, this wholesale destruction is not even attaining its own end of making powerlines less likely to be damaged from tree branches, it is further endangering the lines from trees whose ability to remain upright is now compromised by losing their neighbors.

This Monday, a small group of residents planted sticks with natural fabric cloths next to the stumps in mourning for these trees in Northfield, Massachusetts and a few in Gill and Erving. There may be nothing we can do to stop the destruction (although we encourage all to try). But regardless, we need to mark our respect and despair at the loss of these trees. What follows is a photo essay of our installation of cloths (related to the Celtic/Scottish practice of tying cloths or clooties to tree branches) in respect for our lost neighbors, the trees. Please join us by making a symbolic gesture of some sort toward trees near you that have fallen to this mal-adapted wholesale killing of our friends, many of whom have lived here longer than two or three generations of our families.

Quote from participant Julia Blyth "It has been with a heavy heart over several months this winter that I watched and listened to the utility company's contactors cut hundreds of hundred plus year old sentinel trees down along the roads I walk and drive on a daily basis. Many of these trees have been like old friends to me over the years, blocking the setting sun from blinding me as I drove to evening meetings, offering reminders of courage to stand tall, but also to be flexible, and of course, shade to keep cool on afternoon walks. Watching them be cut and then partially chipped up, leaving their stumps and their younger neighbors (perhaps, like me, missing their sturdy elders), has been tremendously sad. I am grateful to my human neighbors for salvaging parts of these downed trees as lumber and firewood and mulch, but the cutting of so many old, old trees along the roads has felt extreme and brutal. I felt the need to mark the loss in some way."

 With gratitude to the trees.

PHOTOGRAPHER CREDIT: CATE WOOLNER

Call to action: Trees in your town need advocates. Become a Tree Warden, join a friends of the trees group, make public your feelings about how trees are being treated in your town. If your Tree Warden is your highway chief, it’s likely they get very little say in their fate. Advocate on the town-wide and state-wide level to show you care. Trees for your town are available from the Arbor Day foundation.

Do you have an organization you’d like to submit for consideration for this page? Please use the form below, and allow a few weeks for us to get back to you. Thank you!