The body and the landscape

MERIDEL LE SUEUR

This quote appeared in the landscape of my reading the other day. It sparkled in the mind the way diamonds of wisdom and insight do. That I keep coming back to it indicates something worth pondering, examining and, in this case, writing about.

Its author, Meridel Le Sueur, was an amazing and notable American woman and writer who died in 1996 at the age of 96. She wrote fiction for children and adults alike, reported on the plight of the poor during the depression of the 1930s, was a friend to the likes of John Reed, Theodore Dreiser and Edna St. Vincent Millay.

She had a successful writing career until the 1950s when she was blacklisted by U.S. Senator Joseph McCarthy. While making it to the black list of the ignoble prevaricator Joseph McCarthy, like being on the enemies list of Richard Nixon, was an emblem of intelligence, personal integrity, both personal and social conscience and the courage of conviction, that list ruined the lives and careers of Le Sueur and many other women and men. All of them were better human beings, more useful inhabitants of planet earth, than was Joseph McCarthy.

Just this one Le Sueur quote, "The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other," has infinitely more value in the world than McCarthy’s entire mean-spirited, unscrupulous career.

The body repeats the landscape. ‘Landscape’ was used in the sense that a writer today might use ‘environment’ or ‘ecological integrity.’

She is recognizing what technological/industrial/corporate society has forgotten, or, at least, ignores (at its own peril): that the body of man and the landscape it inhabits are the same, that what happens to the landscape happens to the human body.

She is acknowledging the connections between, for example, AIDS and the destruction of the African landscape, obesity and the environmental devastation caused by hog farms in the Carolinas (and Idaho), leukemia and nuclear testing on both ocean and land, heart disease/stroke/lung cancer and fields of tobacco throughout the world.

They are the source of each other and create each other. That the landscape of earth is the source of the human body is evident. Our bodies are but a conglomeration of water and minerals, vitamins and salts, leached from the earth and set to life from we know not where or why. That the human body creates the landscape, the environment, the ecology of life on planet earth from the way it lives can be seen in any number of ways, none of them so mysterious as the very fact of our lives.

If Le Sueur’s insight is even partially accurate, it should make us look at the landscape around us with more critical vision. I think it is exactly accurate, that what we do to the earth we do to ourselves, that living so as to leave no trace is not just a green slogan of environmental idealism: it is the practice of self-interest, self-sufficiency, self-respect.

The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other. The interest, sufficiency and respect of body and landscape are the same.

Seen from this perspective, what we have created, are creating and continue to create out of the landscape that has created and continues to create us contains some disturbing, ah, realities.

Among them:

In the Gulf of Mexico an area roughly the size of New Jersey has been turned, in the relatively short time of 50 years, from a cornucopia of marine life into what scientists call a "hypoxic region." This means "dead zone."

It is caused by the excessive use of synthesized nitrogen fertilizer used on crops in the Midwest and the lower Mississippi Valley. This causes "nitrogen fixation," which leads to an excess of nutrient runoff into the Mississippi River and then into the Gulf. This, in turn, leads to vast algal blooms which decay and absorb the free oxygen in the water, depriving fish of oxygen.

A dead zone the size of New Jersey in our landscape.

What does a dead zone the size of New Jersey mean to our bodies?

Closer to home, the Idaho Conservation League reports, "Nitrate contamination is the most common found contaminant in Idaho’s groundwater and poses the most widespread public health threat. Nitrates and their breakdown products are linked to cancer and reduced blood-oxygen levels or ‘blue baby’ syndrome. The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) describes fertilizers, cattle manure, and legume crops (which ‘fix’ nitrogen) as the main sources of nitrates—contributing a full 93% --in the upper Snake River basin which stretches from the Wyoming border to Glenns Ferry."

"In the upper Snake River basin, domestic septic systems contribute less than 1%, but in more densely populated areas they contribute much more. In some urban areas, the shift from septic tanks to sewer systems for newer homes has meant decreased nitrate pollution of groundwater, but many new homes, on hillsides for example, still go in with septic tanks."

"One example of nitrate contamination is found in Shelley, Idaho (near Idaho Falls) where the Pillsbury Company spreads wastewater from its potato processing plant. Local residents believe that the wastewater is the cause of pollution found in drinking water wells. This is a good example of one of the problems we face as spreading industrial wastes and treated domestic sewage on the land is increasingly seen as a solution to surface water quality problems."

What (in addition to cancer and blue-baby syndrome) does spreading industrial wastes and domestic sewage on the land mean to our bodies?

"The body repeats the landscape. They are the source of each other and create each other."