Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
Some thoughts on health and wholeness from Wendell Berry (posted below) resonate right now, in a world where our division has become both a goal and a means.
What if as we isolate in response to COVID-19, we also find our way to wholeness: as individuals, as families, as communities, as a world? That sounds kinda like a riddle, right? Isolate to become whole? But it just feels like what this time is asking of us, or perhaps offering.
I see people generously posting their offers to help others; I see people turning inward toward their families with quality time. I see something broken, like a child finding a bird that has fallen from a nest, and others wanting to fix it. I think there is hope in that.
—————
“If we were lucky enough as children to be surrounded by grown-ups who loved us, then our sense of wholeness is not just the sense of completeness in ourselves but also is the sense of belonging to others and to our place; it is an unconscious awareness of community, of having in common. It may be that this double sense of singular integrity and of communal belonging is our personal standard of health for as long as we live. Anyhow, we seem to know instinctively that health is not divided.
Of course, growing up and growing older as fallen creatures in a fallen world can only instruct us painfully in division and disintegration. This is the stuff of consciousness and experience. But if our culture works in us as it should, then we do not age merely into disintegration and division, but that very experience begins our education, leading us into knowledge of wholeness and of holiness. I am describing here the story of Job, of Lazarus, of the lame man at the pool of Bethesda, of Milton’s Samson, of King Lear. If our culture works in us as it should, our experience is balanced by education; we are led out of our lonely suffering and are made whole.” —Wendell Berry
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She has served on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) of the New England Aquarium and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
(May 27, 2016) The phrase “and mayhem ensued” turns out to have real application when you have animals. Recently, in a fit of cleanliness, I asked our handyman Keith to help spring clean the barn. He tidied up in general, but because he’s no slouch, he decided to surprise me by washing the historic windows that line the south facing wall. Those window had not been cleaned in twenty years.
The effect was startlingly beautiful, like looking at the freshest spring pool and being surprised to see an azure sky animated with clouds. But as I stood admiring them, I heard the “Flluh flluh flluh” of a large winged bird taking flight behind me. It was one of the juvenile peacocks heading straight for the windows. The scene slowed in a visual time lapse, the geometric effect of the bird against the pane of the windows like that of an origami bird folding in a flash of iridescence. The peacock rocketed straight through the glass and banked right towards a tree in the back of the barn. His flock mates looked as stunned as I was. Shards of glass were strewn all over the paddock where our Leicester Longwools were happily grazing. The peacock was now perched fifty feet up on the very top of an oak tree.
Peacocks are able flyers, so trying to catch one is futile. It’s all awkward flirtation like a scene that plays out in a bar. I stood beneath the tree trying to make “Caw, caw, caw” sounds, while I tapped the side of the metal food scoop filled with his favorite food. He ignored me. I opened the door where his flock mates were, standing guard so the cows on the other side didn’t enter the peacock barn and no other peafowls became flight risks. I put down a line of food from the tree to the door. I went back to singing “Caw, caw, caw.” The peacock wouldn’t give me the dignity of looking down.
I went back to the farmhouse, leaving a door to the barn open with a stash of grain and water inside. Dusk was approaching. I was fairly confident the bird would come back to roost once night fell. But I was wrong again. As darkness descended, I saw the bird had taken perch in the highest point on the property, the peak of the barn, as if he were some weathervane.
Again, I grabbed the metal scoop and hit it, singing “Caw, caw, caw.” Some people never learn.
As I was looking up at the barn roof, a police cruiser came by and stopped.
“What are you looking at?” the officer asked from the car. ‘
“A peacock,” I answered, rolling my eyes. “Please don’t make me explain this,” I thought to myself.
“Is it supposed to be there?” he asked.
“Yes. It’s ours,” I explained. “He got out. He’s not supposed to be up there, though.”
“Do you want any help?” the policeman asked.
“What did you have in mind?” I said, taking the bait.
“Well, I’m a good shot,” he sneered. Clearly, he was joking, but I was not laughing.
“Thanks, anyway, officer.” It wasn’t exactly a Make Way for Ducklings encounter, but I had to admit I felt some satisfaction imagining my friend Laura Laverdiere later having the incident report brighten her night shift as dispatcher.
It was now dark and barely 40 degrees. The peacock had hunkered down for the night, fluffing its feathers against the wind. I went inside.
All night long, I checked from the second floor bathroom window. Though it was a full moon and an eclipse, the cloud cover made it impossible to see but the faint outline of a shadow perched on the barn roof. The peacock was still there.
At dawn, my husband texted me, “Still on the roof,” as he left for work. By 7:00 a.m. the peacock was gone, nowhere to be found. I walked the property, but didn’t see him. I left the door to the barn open again with some grain. But in fact, it looked like none of what I had left before had been disturbed. I was batting exactly zero.
“Well, maybe he’ll be like some interesting mascot that people all over the Valley will come to see: the peacock that perches on the gable ridge of the barn on the hill, it’s massive majestic tail cascading down the roof. It would be like the scene at the end of ‘Field of Dreams,’ with lines of cars snaking down the street,” I thought to myself as I officially gave up. Farming is all improvisation, no matter how much you plan. There’s always some ghost popping out of a cornfield wanting to play baseball.
Later in the day, I casually glanced out the window and saw the peacock roaming beside a chicken on our lawn. This was my chance. He was on the ground. But my only hope was to lure him inside and corner him. So I grabbed some wild bird seed from our mudroom and put a little on the porch in a line leading inside, leaving our front door wide open. “This will never work,” I thought.
A couple of hours later, I checked our mudroom. The peacock and the hen had both come inside to eat the birdseed. I had him! I ran around the other side of the house to close the front door. He was caught in our mudroom (with the hen). Now things got serious. I needed a kid to help me.
Even at 9 months old, peacocks are large and have talons that could injure. Our mudroom is small and if he was scared and flying wildly, it could be dangerous. So I asked 11-year old Zach to help me. We gathered our tools: a blanket, two pairs of sunglasses, and two pairs of gloves. Zach would be backup.
We both put on the sunglasses and gloves. We looked like we were about to commit a crime. Zach trailed behind me with the blanket, like an overgrown Linus. The blanket was in case the peacock panicked. We would then catch him with the blanket, putting a layer of protection between us and him, and giving him the gift of blindness.
But the only one who panicked was the hen, who flew awkwardly around the mudroom, breaking a mason jar, while the peacock allowed me to calmly pick him up and clutch him to my chest. There were shards of broken glass to clean up. But that could wait. The peacock was back with his flock mates in time for dinner, with his own wild story of a boy, a blanket, a view of the valley, and a crazy lady with sunglasses banging a metal scoop and singing.
(October 3, 2019) Last week I had the privilege to present at the Wright Locke Farm Speaker Series in Winchester, MA as part of Climate Week.
After an emotional week of watching youth all over the world rise up to simply ask for a livable future, it was heartening to see so many adults filling seats to hear more about climate solutions. The setting could not have been more appropriate in a barn of the same vintage as ours at Jo-Erl Farm overlooking a pasture where Rhode Island Red chickens roamed, much like they had during the time my grandfather kept a poultry on our land about sixty miles south of this one. It was hard to not wonder if these two farm families had ever met.
I’ve long held one foot each in two camps: farms and oceans. I usually quip that “farms chose me, but I chose oceans.” Yet it has become increasingly clear that climate change is asking us to look more inter-sectionally at solutions. Might thinking holistically about necessary changes to farming and ocean conservation be a climate solution that is greater than the sum of its parts?
Farming and Its impact on the Ocean
Oceans have for decades been negatively impacted by conventional farming, where a heavy reliance on inputs such as fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides find their way to the sea carried downstream by rivers, rain, and flooding and cause increases in algal blooms, dead zones, and red tides. This method of farming strips soil of its living matter, which creates a vicious cycle of needing to increase nutrient loading to simply continue production. As the soil becomes more denuded, this leaves much of our farmland less able to hold water, and more subject to flooding and desertification, which further contribute to sedimentation and runoff entering our oceans.
Additionally, the carbon footprint of conventional farming has many of us wondering how we can continue to feed a growing world and attack climate change at the same time? In addition to contributing up to a 1/3 of the current greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, part of the equation includes the 50-60% of the carbon that conventional farming activities like tillage (plowing) releases into the environment from soil.
The solution appears to be right under our feet: soil! Soil is a natural carbon sink, which means it takes carbon out of the atmosphere. Yet we have degraded soil’s ability to do so by a hundred years of farm practices that takes carbon out of the soil instead.
What if I told you there is a method of farming that requires little to no inputs and helps soil maintain its health, vitality, nutrients, ability to hold water, and capacity to take carbon out of the atmosphere and sequester it into the soil? You might think I was dreaming. But fortunately, it’s true! Known as regenerative farming, this method of farming rebuilds our soils by little to no tillage, the planting of cover crops that fix nutrients into the soil, a reliance on poly-culture and diversity in the community, and the careful management of animal grazing through a method that mimics the bison on the prairie with high density herd management and constant movement and rotation in temporary paddocks.
Project Drawdown rates regenerative farming as number 11 on their list of top climate change solutions.
Furthermore, there is a business case to be made for regenerative agriculture: farmers can expect a pay off in increased yields and less labor. Project Drawdown estimates a pay off of $1.93 trillion by 2050 after an investment $57.22 billion. That’s a pretty enticing investment, without even considering about the impacts related to the ocean and its conservation.
To put this context of the other Project Drawdown climate solutions, regenerative agriculture holds more promise than nuclear or offshore wind turbines.
How Does This Relate to the Ocean?
If we look back at all of the impacts of conventional farming on the ocean: from increased sedimentation to fertilizer runoff to non-point pollution from decreased water retention, regenerative agriculture is positioned through its lack of chemical inputs and water retention to reduce every one of those negative impacts. I have yet to see anyone who has done the science to reconcile the full cross-benefits of regenerative agriculture on ocean conservation, but it stands to reason that these methods could help mitigate many of these chronic and acute impacts to ocean health currently caused by conventional farming.
Ocean conservation matters—but not just for the protein from the ocean that 2 billion people in the world rely on, but as a climate mitigator. The ocean absorbs much of the heat from greenhouse gases, as well as takes 20-30% of the excess carbon out of the atmosphere. However, it is the living biomass in the ocean that makes the ocean impactful as a carbon sink. If we lose this biomass because of overfishing, die-offs and dead zones, we have decreased our ocean’s capacity to perform this critical function.
Whales, for example, can take 190,000 tons of carbon out of the atmosphere a year: the equivalence of 80,000 cars a year being taken off the roads. Their conservation is not just a matter of their charisma, romance or tourism value, but rather that they perform an important service in mitigating climate.
As Aldo Leopold once said, “the first law of intelligent tinkering is to keep all the parts.” Ocean conservation, regenerative farming, flood mitigation, fresh water conservation and our other efforts to create climate resiliency should be part of an integrated strategy, one where all the parts are on the table together.
How to Get Others to Join
Yet, as the millions of marchers across the globe during climate week were asking us to notice, to date we have lacked the political will to act at the necessary scale. What will it take to get others to join with us?
Research shows the single best motivator and predictor of activism is not information, but the degree of connectedness one experiences in community. Furthermore, additional motivators include a sense of place, a sense of meaning, and sense of self within the larger context.
Which begs the question: what sort of experiences give us that sense of place and sense of meaning within the larger context?
Over the 25 years I have been working with youth in environmental education—on both farms and in the ocean—young people have been teaching me the answer.
Sometimes, it looks like this:
Ocean Matters teens removing invasive mangroves in Hawai’i.
Othertimes, it look like this:
Sometimes, it sounds like this:
But it always assuredly feels like this:
A spontaneous moment with Ocean Matters teens from Florida after finishing a coral restoration project.
We might not all come to the table, ready to eat; but just being invited can become the greatest healer of all. And once we are included, we can begin to experience the gifts of belonging, resiliency, and the expansion of our sense of tribe.
It’s the hands-on experiences within our community addressing real need that will make the difference to turn keying others to help with the urgency of climate change. We simply must engage everyone—no matter their political leaning— in understanding how our health and lives are tied to the living biosphere in ways each can appreciate and understand.
We do not need to start with climate change. In fact, perhaps it’s better if we don’t. Simply start with what there is to love about where you live and connect to how the intricately-laced systems sustain us.
Programs growing food on farms like the ones at Wright Locke and engagements with ocean conservation and our watershed like Ocean Matters are critical to this sense of connection. As my dear friend Liz Cunningham, author of Ocean Country, so aptly says, “hope is a verb.”
Climate change might just be asking us to understand our place, not just the place of whales and farms, in that larger whole. So as we reach out to ask others to join with us—our neighbors, our youth, our institutions— let’s remember to break down silos that keep us isolated and to create structures for new connections, including places for each of us to make meaning from the fact that we truly belong.
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Laura Parker Roerden
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She has served on the boards of Women Working for Oceans (W20) of the New England Aquarium and Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
Several nights this week I have lain in bed
listening to the call and response of three barred owls
outlining each cardinal direction—save for the south—
which is oddly missing in the chorus, as if the baritones
had boarded a bus for Times Square for some dancing
and Christmas lights, while a deadly serious conversation
was happening between the sopranos, altos and tenors.
I do not know why they are calling with such urgency,
but something about it feels like a warning or lit with longing;
there is a sense that something of great value is slipping
away. Yet each evening, as the thick coat of darkness is applied
to the wide open sky, erasing shades of apricot and purple,
I too often rise in dream or prayer,
trying to unwind
the tangled mess
that is living
and seeking
safer shores.
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
(June 6, 2017) If you’re a certain age, you might remember those strobe disco lights from the 70s and how they not only slowed down action, but captured and unnaturally suspended a singular moment. I can still see my college roommate’s expression while she danced at the disco we went to in her Brooklyn neighborhood that had been featured in Saturday Night Fever. Time stood fragmented in shards, as if broken like glass.
A couple moments in the past week have likewise entered my heart’s memory as if they happened in the presence of a strobe: our sheep Juniper violently head butting her two day old lamb away from her as the lamb attempted to nurse and my youngest Ben grabbing his head and falling to the ground when a football hit his eye.
Juniper’s sweet little black lamb with wisps of white on her face and edging her ears was born on Sunday evening May 21st. I first heard her call when I entered the barn on Monday morning to feed the animals. The newborn lamb was already dry and standing. I held my breath as I watched the tiny lamb trying to nurse. Juniper’s long teats appeared to be too low from the tiny mouth to grab. Over hours of watching, she eventually started to suckle. By lunch I was satisfied all was well and left.
I returned at 3:00 to find a frantic lamb, hungrily crying. By 5:00 she was nearly listless in a corner; I knew we had a problem. I called Evan, our farm camp manager, and asked him to come. It was he who noticed that Juniper had a third, nonfunctioning teat that the lamb had been unsuccessfully suckling. The poor lamb had yet to eat.
Colostrum is the first milk and must be given to the lamb within the first 12 hours since birth to build a proper immune system, so we milked Juniper and bottle fed the lamb before she lay like a rag doll on our arms sound asleep, “milk drunk” and fatigued from a day of being born into a world where only hunger greeted her. The lamb was content, but had so far failed to nurse.
Luna, milk drunk, with her arm sprayed out in the exact position where she fell asleep once she was finally fed.
In this first lambing season, we’ve learned so much about nursing from watching Juniper’s flock mate Juliette successfully bond and latch with her lamb Lulu. Weeks ago, I had stood awestruck watching Juliette minutes after giving birth, as she nudged her newborn lamb’s hind quarters with her nose to her udder while the baby latched. The mother continued to nudge the baby’s hind quarters while she nursed, together forming a perfect circle of connection.
Lulu lamb with her mother, Juliette.
But Juniper did not want her baby to latch; she pushed her away. I called the vet and asked for advice. Dr. Rosario suggested putting Vicks vapor rub in Juniper’s nose, so she’s wouldn’t be able to smell the baby. Apparently, this sometimes works. But it did not. A night of trial and error taught us that the only thing that worked was inserting ourselves between the mother and the lamb. We would crouch and scratch Juniper’s head, while also patting the lamb’s hind quarters and the mother would settle; the baby would latch. It was as if we were completing an electrical circuit of contact between the mother and her offspring.
I was in the barn helping the newborn baby nurse, among other chores, on Memorial Day weekend when I heard my own youngest child crying. Ben, age 10, had been hit by a football thrown by his brother without adequate warning. The ball hit him squarely in the eye. Ben hit the ground, holding his head in both hands, a single stream of blood stretching from his eye to his chin. He had blacked out momentarily.
The on-call pediatrician advised me to by-pass our local city hospitals and take him directly to Children’s Hospital in Boston, “because of the nature of the injury,” she explained ominously. He would need an on-call pediatric ophthalmologist. I could hardly breathe as I drove the familiar route into Boston, talking to Ben to make sure he was still cognitively alert and occasionally glancing in the rear view mirror nervously.
Six hours later after observation and a thorough eye exam, we returned home from Boston with eye drops Ben would need four times a day for a bleed in his eye and guidelines for managing a concussion. Juniper also needed to be fed four times a day, so I put them both on the same schedule and cancelled everything to watch for the list of neurological signs of resumed bleeding in Ben’s head or eye.
Each time I’d lean in to scratch Juniper’s head and watch her reluctantly nurse, I’d worry about my human baby and the half hour I was not vigilantly watching him. But as the days stretched on into weeks and my fatigue rose, my heart also went out to the new mother sheep. I don’t think any of us mothers have been spared days when the hard edges of what’s required of giving yourself over to our children hasn’t left us spent, feeling reluctant at best or resentful at worst. The big picture is not always immediately available to us in the moments when a hungry baby can’t wait and your own swollen body hurts from the strain of birth and nursing. These moments of parenting can feel fragmented and disproportionate in its request of us as if under a strobe. Or sometimes we fear we might not be quite equal to the task. What if we can’t figure out how to feed the baby or we miss a symptom of a brain or eye bleed?
My childhood friend Kathy (Goff) Bucchino helping Luna nurse.
In the weeks since Luna was born and Ben was injured, we’ve employed a legion of dear friends and family to meet the needs of a newborn lamb and to cover pickups of older siblings at sports and other events while Ben goes to followup appointments. It takes a village, I’m reminded. And as Juniper has taught us: sometimes it takes someone else mitigating between us and our problems as if completing an electrical circuit. It’s there, in that spark, where the shards of glass against which we have uncomfortably strained become again whole.
Our middle son Zach with Luna after helping with a feeding.
Laura Parker Roerden is the founding director of Ocean Matters and the former managing editor of Educators for Social Responsibility and New Designs for Youth Development. She serves on the board of Earth, Ltd. and is a member of the Pleiades Network of Women in Sustainability. She lives on her fifth generation family farm in MA.
