On Thursday, April 8th, the Board of Directors of Farm Credit of Maine presented their 2010 Distinguished Service Award to Dr. Bill Beardsley, former President of Husson University and current candidate for the Republican nomination for Governor. Following are Bill’s remarks to the more than two hundred attendees of the event.
Delivered at the Farm Credit of Maine Annual Meeting
April 8, 2010
This past week, two news items caught my attention. The first was a National Public Radio report that a move was afoot to make access to the Internet an entitlement of every citizen of the world, a policy to be enforced by the United Nations.
The second was an Ellsworth American editorial about the 1992 Biodiversity Treaty of the United Nations designating millions of acres of Maine’s working woods a neo-wilderness and how the newest version is emerging again, called “Maine’s Treasured Landscape.”
What ever happened to the 4-H world? Are we, in this room tonight, the actual endangered species, our values and way of life withering away? Well, I don’t think so!
Let me start by sharing a strange experience I had. A while back I led a workshop on sustainable forestry in Russia’s Far Eastern forests, of all places.
One day, Elbridge Cleeves, a Maine forester from Danforth who was with me on the workshop, asked Alexis, a Russian forester, “So, Alexis, how do you decide what to do with that Birch tree?”
Alexis said, “Easy. The central office in Moscow develops a plan for harvests across the country. We do what they say. If they say “It’s birch veneer, then it is birch veneer; if they say it’s firewood, it’s firewood. How about you?”
Elbridge scratched his head, “Well, that depends on the free market, supply and demand, pricing, each landowner’s family objective, competition. You know… ‘The Invisible Hand.’”
“No, I do not know,” said Alexis. “Please explain!”
So, I ask you tonight, have you ever tried to explain the free enterprise, capitalistic, competitive world we live in every day? But, more importantly, do you think our Public Schools include these concepts in their Maine Learning Results, in their curriculum? No! But for our kitchen tables, Maine youth of today are at risk on knowing no more about free enterprise than Alexis knows, deep in the Russian forest.
The next day, David Carlisle, a large Maine landowner from Bangor who was also with me on the workshop, was explaining a Maine referendum question on Maine forests when Nikita interrupted. “This makes no sense,” said Nikita, “You come from America, from Maine, to tell us how you are socializing your forests while we are handing our forests back to the people, where they belong?” Nikita’s observations really hit home.
Finally, the night before we left, we were gathered at a lodge deep in the Russian forest, around a table covered with root crops, vodka and rye bread. The Russians seemed sullen, had nothing to say, so, through a translator, I said, “You know, when I was a kid, I always imagined Russians sitting around their tables at night singing their National Anthem and the Volga Boat Song.”
Suddenly the Russians got very angry. They snarled, shook fists at us, yelled at us, yelled at each other, then their leader, Ivan, spun around, pointed his gnarled finger in my face and, through the translator, shouted, “Okay, you get your way. Not only will we sing, but we will sing for two hours, and we will only sing songs about the forest!” And they did. They sang the entire night away.
So, tonight, as we, too, gather, let us ask, “Who will sing the songs of our forests fields and sea? Who will be out James Whitcomb Riley who writes, “Sunshine spread, thick as butter on country bread, out to old Aunt Mary’s”, or Edgar Allen Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee and Her Kingdom by the Sea” – If not us, who?
For our generation our songs are told in the recipe for Maple Sugar Pie, in each patch of Granny’s old patchwork quilt, in the now “countrified” country fair, in the old cellar hole, now deep in the forest. Yet, these songs, these values and traditions at risk of becoming relics of the past if we don’t reinvent them and pass them on.
We need to stand by the stately mature black spruce and explain to all, there is an elemental loss if, instead of harvesting that spruce tree for lumber for our homes, planks for our dories, furniture and musical instruments, chips and saw dust for our paper mills, bark for our garden mulch, cull for our biomass boilers, composite wood for bridges: that instead of all this, we simply let the spruce grow old, fall to the forest floor and simply rot away.
We need for other Mainer’s to walk the fields that took a century to clear and ask them, “Is there not a societal loss to Maine if that productive field goes back to forest?”
And we need to befriend the summer folk who bought old Captain Henry’s post and beam house at the head of the harbor, where they, like Captain Henry, love watching the lobster boat swing on its mooring. And, then we need to convince those summer folk that the depth of the beauty of that lobster boat is largely lost if it does not start its motor at the crack of dawn, if a father’s son is not in the stern, if the smell of bait is gone.
An to today’s Maine youth, who have been brought up in suburbia, educated in a progressive school curriculum that begins history in 1877, we need to bring alive the story of how our ancestors, their ancestors, came and why, as Tom Paine wrote in 1776:
“O! Yee that love mankind! Ye that dare oppose not only the tyranny but the tyrant, stand forth! Every spot of this world is overrun with oppression, freedom has been hunted round the globe… O! Receive the fugitive [here in rural Maine] and prepare an asylum for mankind…”
And Abraham Lincoln reminds us:
“Destroy this spirit and you have planted the seeds of despotism at your own doors.”
Who, but we in this room will remind the next generation of Mainers that all their own family roots came from serfdom in Russia, landless peasantry in Europe, slavery, starvation, class and caste societies, communism and lack of freedom? That our people came from the north with Evangeline centuries ago, from impersonal suburbs today?
We in this room need to see ourselves as Ronald Reagan saw us, as a “special interest group” that, in Reagan’s words, “Has too long been neglected. It knows no sectional boundaries, or ethnic and racial divisions and it crosses political party lines. It is made up of men and women who [work our forests, fish our oceans], till our soil, patrol our streets, man our mills and mines, teach our children, [make us loans,] keep our homes, heal us when we are sick. Professionals, shopkeepers and truck drivers. They are, in short, “We the people”. This breed called “Americans.” Friends, this breed is WE.”
In short, our Maine agrarian life is at a crossroads. Which way will we lead?
So, now let’s consider something we take for granted: Our towns. Originally British aristocrats proposed a County structure of government for Maine, over which, of course, would be a British lord. Then the American federalists and loyalists proposed a centralized state and federal government.
But, in the end, the non-federalist, the democrat settlers, farmers and townspeople – that’s us – won out in the Constitution and Bill of Rights and we got our private land and local towns.
But, have no illusion, the federalists have not gone away. Maine’s LURC, the Land Use Regulatory Commission, personifies government with no vested ties to the land or its people. We hear talk of reducing the size of the legislature, shifting local services to the county, school consolidation, all proposed under the guise of quality and efficiency.
We need to respond. Take just our little schools: We should ask, why is it that a disproportionate number of Husson University’s valedictorians come from these so-called “too small” rural schools?
Why is it that the internet library and learning tools, an array of on-line curriculum and assessment tools, accessible in most every kitchen 24/7, with tutorials form retired scholarly neighbors, apprenticeships with a master logger or the like, all available to our home schooled boys and girls, why they cannot become a model for our rural public schools as well?
Perhaps the challenge of rural schools is far less about school size and far more about the endless red tape and reporting that takes teachers away from students for hours and days at a time. Perhaps it’s the over use of Special Ed, when what some rural kids only need is just a little extra help the first year they come to school.
Maybe our dropout rates are high because history, free enterprise, vocational/technical education have been pushed out of Maine’s curriculum – stuff that rural students understand and want to learn.
Maybe the SAT test isn’t the right measure for the kid who wants to make a living on the sea?
Was it not rural New England education philosopher John Dewey who developed the concept of experiential learning 100 years ago, the concept of wedding hands-on-learning with classroom learning?
Should we not revisit such a philosophy – perhaps in rural charter schools, turning our teachers back into professionals, brushing the excesses out the back door? Hasn’t Maine’s best incubator always been the rural school?
The specifics and strategies may differ, but ask yourselves this question: If a world-class global consultant with McKinsey and Company can alternate his consulting base between Brussels, Belgium, and a summer home in rural Maine, which is true, then can’t we give our children a first-class, affordable education in that same rural Maine town as well?
Of course we can!
If Chinese students travel halfway around the world to study, play sports and receive a world-class education at rural Foxcroft Academy, in tiny East Machias and Lee, so can we. They see what we see.
The rural school is at the heart of our Maine way of life. It is part of what we must preserve. Now let us leave the town and go into the field and forest. Let us now turn to what it is we know.
Let us revisit our endangered Canadian Lynx in Maine. Those of you who work the woods know that the lynx’s demise relates to the decline of its favorite food stock – the snowshoe hare. And you also know that the hare is gone because it habitat – brush, thickets, briar patches have disappeared. And all also this undergrowth is disappearing because of peculiar aspects of a mandated timber management practice called “sustainable forestry”, where a full canopy overhead, after harvest, leaves almost nothing alive on the forest floor.
We know the solution, the word thou shalt not speak in Maine, a small patchwork quilt of clear cuts, which dramatically enriches the animal’s habitat and population.
This is but one of thousands of examples of how those of you who own and work the land spend a lifetime connecting the dots, enriching Maine’s natural landscape because you own it – it is your life.
George Perkins Marsh, the fountainhead of the ecology movement over a century ago, wrote in his renowned treatise “Man and Nature” in 1873, “Government certainly would not be the proper agent. Rather, “landed property (private property)… would increase its value to the possessor and to the State.”
We need to keep singing this private property song, that our private lands are where Maine conservation and prosperity are wed.
Tonight let’s learn a new ballad, The Ballad of The Widow Thelma, who inherited her family’s 40 acres of 100-year old, beautiful mature white pine. It is her old age pension, her legacy.
Then, as our ballad goes, one early May morning, her friends from The Agency arrive, wander through her woodlot only to return to tell Thelma they found a water-filled skidder rut, a soggy cellar hole, with clusters of wood frog eggs therein.
“How nice,” says Thelma, “I’ll have to take a walk to see them.”
“But you don’t understand,” comes the reply, “What you now own is not sustenance for your life and posterity but rather a protective zone around two protected vernal pools.”
Thelma now becomes the endangered species.
We must ask ourselves anew, is this not a taking, as defined in the 5th Article of the Bill of Rights, as much a taking as when the King of England carved the mark of the broad arrow on Maine settler’s trees some 300 years ago and proclaimed “Your pine are mine”?
Is this not as compelling a ballad as any of the songs of Peter, Paul and Mary? But, ONLY if they are sung!
Or, a ballad in the making, of a third generation, thirty year old potato farmer I met in the Valley the other night, who had recently learned that a federally approved insecticide was to be banned in Maine, the same insecticide that had made it possible for him to sign a long-sought contract with a buyer of his crop.
We need to better tell his story, and to tie it to global realities, that just such insecticides have ended starvation for billions of people around the globe, doubled the life expectancies in so much of the Third World, lifted our fellow human beings out of poverty and toward democracy, to become our competitors, not dependencies. We need to sing the potato farmer’s song!
These are just samples of our agrarian ways of thinking, human stories that most Mainers need and want to hear.
This brings me to a final thought. It is what I call “neighboring”.
In the old days, the neighbors raised the barn together, harvested firewood together, borrowed salt, mended stone walls, sat together at church and at town meetings, shared their lives in an organic way.
Today, our rural neighborhoods are challenged and diluted because every other neighboring house is vacant half the day, the others vacant half the year plus a day. We know these neighbors love the Maine we love, but how do we knead them truly into our community?
Somehow we need to find a way to have them live next door fulltime, year-round, to be employed. All the more reason for better schools, all the more reason to preserve the town. All the more reason to help them learn the interrelationships of man and the land and sea, to learn our songs. All the more reason to bring taxes and regulations into line. Then they will come and make Maine, our small towns their homes as well, and bring with them their ideas, their creativity, and their families.
These are tough times for Maine. Many of our rural counties have average family incomes only 60% of the national average, and falling. Yet, we need all Mainer’s to see Maine as we see out timberlands and farms:
We see a Maine land mass the same size as Ireland.
We see millions of acres of commercial forest and arable land.
We see a 3,500-mile coastline with seaports well on the way to European ports.
We see one of the world’s richest markets – the Northeastern United States – right next door.
We see world-class lobster, shellfish and blueberries.
We see low population densities and an abundance of resources in an otherwise overcrowded world.
We see an agrarian way of life that personifies private property, freedom, free enterprise, traditional values, new innovation and technology that is the envy of the world.
We see that we can once again become a state where productivity, self-reliance and neighboring trump dependency.
And, as always, we will find new ways.
Collectively, we in this room and the people we represent own 40% of the landmass of New England.
Collectively, we have the ability to create a consumer-owned electric power generating cooperative using sub-prime money to buy back those hydro dams and produce low-cost power if we choose.
Collectively, we can create the volumes needed for a private, world-class cargo port and an East-West highway.
Collectively, we can attract an LNG terminal to help dual-fuel our bio-fuel boilers.
Collectively, we persuaded the federal government to lift load limits on the highway. We can do the same for drilling for natural gas in the Gulf of Maine.
We have done it before… We can do it again.
The vision of an agrarian future is strong. But all this visioning does not start from on high. It begins with each family, with each family business, each community, your local banker and, above all else, your shared core values and dreams.
I know a little of these share values and dreams because, for close to a quarter century I have been blessed with the opportunity to educate your children, neighbors and friends, from virtually every small Maine town. In those Maine youth who have come through Husson I have seen the core qualities that have always made this state, and this nation strong.
We simply need to sing the songs. The next generation is alive and well and waiting to carry on.
Visit the Bill Beardsley for Governor campaign website.