In the changing world of post-financial-crash America, are residents of the Susquehanna Valley more like blue-necked Na’vi in the film Avatar than the rednecks they were often assumed to be by some “outsiders,” even in academic and environmental networks within Pennsylvania?

About a year ago I was at a terrific rivertowns symposium at Bucknell organized by colleagues in sociology and geography here and at Bloomsburg, and including many community organization leaders.

Speakers discussed the deep extended family networks of many in the region, citing for example a newspaper obituary that listed about 100 surviving relatives of one deceased valley resident. The resiliency of those networks in bad times, including subsistence hunting and fishing and other forms of family and employment help, was discussed.

Yet there was also much bewailing of the localism engendered by such networks, and the difficulty of outside or “newcomer” activists “finding a way in” to engage them. And there were calls (as at many other such gatherings) for finding a way to develop regionalism to encourage economic development (often couched in terms of tourism).

Well, today in dealing with challenges such as living with and regulating Marcellus Shale drilling, and post-crash economic realities nationwide, in which tourism may no longer offer a bright future either, maybe localism and deep extended personal social networks (not Facebook!) really need to be looked at as a strength of the region more than a problem.

Maybe the real problem is that “we” in media, academia, the blogosphere, and many not-for-profits, have not yet figured out effective ways to engage that localism constructively as a force for sustainable economics at a regional level.

Land conservancies and watershed associations are an incredibly valuable start; one example my family and I just visited for a hike yesterday is the Dale’s Ridge Trail on the edge of Lewisburg, maintained by the Lynn Conservancy and involving the Union County historical Society and groups ranging from local professors to longtime area farmers and the Children of the American Revolution. The Buffalo Creek Watershed Association works to restore the stream nearby. Regionally, new plans for heritage and bike-hiking corridors (to be explored more here in future blogs) offer similar great opportunities for re-linking people and physical environment in our valley.

But many of our approaches to regionalism remain colored by the American tendency to separate “nature” and “culture.” Wilderness is nature, and it’s out there.

Even the fact that the upper Susquehanna Valley includes so much public state forestland, a national and international treasure in these days of global rising populations and dwindling natural resources, has aided and abetted the worries raised by Marcellus Shale drilling.

That’s partly because of how twentieth-century scientific models behind the framework of that forest system, often linked to mainstream environmentalism, may have unintentionally encouraged a sense of separation between human community and nature at the same time.

It’s still “us” as the intellect studying “you” as object, while creating grids of public land removed from local control and regular community entwinements.

And this easily turns nature into an abstraction, despite the best of intentions, ironically increasing potential exploitation in some ways.

Recently in the New York Times, David Brooks (whose work, incidentally, I’m not usually a fan of) wrote a column with an important insight on the changing nature of power elites in America. While nostalgia for the “good old days” of the national elites he describes is wholly undeserved, the increased lack of localism in our national emphasis on the abstract skills of a placeless meritocracy often does remove our social and economic leaders from longterm care of local regions across generations, as he notes.

How do we highlight, articulate, and encourage such longterm caring for the land today in the Susquehanna Valley, without contributing to more of the same problems of environmental degradation that have bedeviled it since the time of the removal of many of its native peoples in the 18^th and 19^th centuries by America’s “old elites”?

How can we join with those surviving and growing Native American survivors who are still here in the valley or returning, and become native peoples of the valley ourselves as well, by realizing both its current and past diversities, and embracing the same in the future?

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Shire is considered by many contemporary people around the world to be an example of a kind of eco-friendly localism. Unknown to many but told by Guy Davenport in his essay “Hobbitry,” Tolkien’s Shire was heavily influenced by his interest in rural Kentucky life, in a culture shaped in the southern range of the same mountains that skirt and cross our very ancient valley.

If the Shire as a retelling of Appalachia (north or south) can help exemplify E.F. Schumacher’s model of “Small is Beautiful,” maybe there are more ways we can seek to do the same in highlighting local cultures and voices of the region here, without needing to turn it into a movie set or theme park.

As a start, it helps to realize, as the Elves told Frodo as he was leaving the Shire, that others have lived here before us, and others will live here after us.

There’s a wisdom in a personal realization of mortality (which no private corporation or government can ever achieve), as well as of deep personal connections with other peoples now and in different eras and in the future with associations to our landscapes.

That’s why the oft-decried biblical notion of the world as being about 7,500 years old (by account of the Septuagint) or about 5,700 years by the Jewish calendar, or traditions in many Native American cultures of their people as having sprung forth from the land, involved a type of environmental time-wisdom ignored by the abstraction of modern geological time and its immensities: The genealogies of Genesis, for example, told people of personal connections back through layers of ancestries linking to the Creation, and of the Creation as coming from a mystery in which human knowledge and control could not and should not tinker, and to which humans were ultimately responsible in all dealings. People living on sacred calendars amid the vagaries of human time also learned to move in several modes of time at once, a talent that some environmental philosophers say can encourage empathy toward non-human worlds in modern ecological perspectives.

In laughing at the Creationism believed in various forms by many people in our region, or (implicitly) at Native American claims to autochthonous origins, we run the risk of also missing the ecological value of premodern traditions as what Michael Schellenberger and Ted Nordhaus called the cultural imagination needed to renew environmentalism in America. “Geography of desire,” my former colleague John Grim called it once, in speaking of his work with the Crow Indians in the Dakotas, and their belief in a mountain as mother and sky as father, yet a desire defined as relation and not lack (and I borrowed his phrase as a chapter title in my book on this kind of geography of story in early cultures around the Irish Sea).

This is the kind of desire exemplified in one reading of the Greek roots of the term ecology, oikos and logia (from logos), as “story of home.” If information as energy is increasingly seen, in fields ranging from physics to semiotics, as the basis of life, this can reinforce a traditional sense of story as shaping our landscape and how we value it—whether in terms of the cosmoc logoi of the Logos in early Christianity, or the manitou or inua of many American Indian peoples.

What kinds of stories of the Susquehanna Valley can help provide links and networks–and a sense of “holy places”—for voicing a regional land ethic from within its people, to weather environmental and economic crises today?

This blog will work on hopefully helping to tell some of those stories in future installments.