blueprints

86 | robert hass
seem to me a very good time to have a large party on Capitol Hill celebrating
the environmental tradition in American writing.
When I returned to the Library (I was commuting from Berkeley and
generating a serious carbon footprint in order to introduce the literary
readings at the Library every other week), I was told that I was perfectly
welcome to develop a symposium on the subject of my choice if I could
come up with the funds. This is the more-than-you want-to-know part of
the story. But I’ve been asked by the Poetry Foundation to write about how
a practical intervention on behalf of cultural literacy came about, and this
part is the story of how that happened. I had spent my adult life raising a
family, teaching literature, writing poetry, and in my spare time translating
poetry or studying languages to translate poetry or writing about poetry. I
didn’t have any experience in fund-raising, and I knew I didn’t have an
appetite for it. And I had no gift for organization.
My first thought was that, if a symposium of writers could be managed—let’s
say eight to ten writers over a three-day weekend of readings
and panel discussions—they would have to be willing to volunteer their
time if their travel expenses could be paid. So I called a few friends to ask if
they liked the idea well enough to volunteer. I think the first person I called
was the poet Gary Snyder, who did like the idea, and we talked at length
about what might be the shape of it. Gary called his friend Wendell Berry,
who also liked the idea, though Wendell is also a farmer and doesn’t like to
travel. And someone—Gary, I think—called Peter Matthiessen, who also
thought it was a good idea. I called two casual friends whose work I
admired, Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams, both of whom had some
experience with the activist environmental community, and they said they
would sign on if they could. They suggested I contact the editor of Orion, a
new literary magazine dedicated to writing in the natural history tradition.
The editor of the magazine was a young man named Laurie Lane-Zucker.
The magazine, he explained to me, was housed in an organization devoted
to environmental education through the arts and through hands-on learning.
It was housed in the Orion Institute, and its founder was a New York
investment banker named Marion Gilliam. Orion magazine had just instituted
a program to send cadres of environmental writers to American university
campuses. Laurie thought there might be a way in which they could
send a troop of writers to Washington, and he suggested that I might meet
with his boss.