Roger Dunsmore Came to the University of Montana in 1963 As a Freshman Composition Instructor in the English Department

January 30 Introduction to the Series Roger Dunsmore Bio: Roger Dunsmore came to the University of Montana in 1963 as a freshman composition instructor in the English Department. In 1964 he also began to teach half- time in the Humanities Program. He taught his first course in American Indian Literature, Indian Autobiographies, in 1969. In 1971 he was an originating member of the faculty group that formed the Round River Experiment in Environmental Education (1971- 74) and has taught in UM’s Wilderness and Civilization Program since 1976. He received his MFA in Creative Writing (poetry) in 1971 and his first volume of poetry.On The Road To Sleeping ChildHotsprings was published that same year. (Revised edition, 1977.) Lazslo Toth, a documentary poem on the smashing of Michelangelo’s Pieta was published in 1979. His second full length volume of poems,Bloodhouse, 1987, was selected by the Yellowstone Art Center, Billings, MX for their Regional Writer’s Project.. The title poem of his chapbook.The Sharp-Shinned Hawk, 1987, was nominated by the Koyukon writer, Mary TallMountain for a Pushcat Prize. He retired from full-time teaching after twenty-five years, in 1988, but continues at UM under a one- third time retiree option. During the 1988-89 academic year he was Humanities Scholar in Residence for the Arizona Humanities Council, training teachers at a large Indian high school on the Navajo Reservation. A chapbook of his reading at the International Wildlife Film Festival, The Bear Remembers, was published in 1990. Spring semester, 1991, (and again in the fall semester, 1997) he taught modern American Literature as UM’s Exchange Fellow with Shanghai International Studies University in mainland China. (Ten poems from Tiger Hill, an unpublished manuscript of poems written off these two China trips, received an Individual Artist’s Fellowship from the Montana Art’s Council in 2001.) In 1997 the University of New Mexico Press published Earth’s Mind: Essays In Native Literature, a volume combining his decades of involvement with American Indian People and their literatures, with his experience of the Montana landscape. His poems and essays have appeared in many journals and anthologies. He is on the board of the Montana Big Open, Inc., a non- profit group working for the restoration of wild bison on 9,000,000 acres in east/central Montana. He is gratefiil for the years spent with the peoples and places of the Northern Rockies and Plains. Speaker’s Suggested Readings: The Marriage O f Heaven and Hell, William Blake Black Elk Speaks, John Neihardt and Nickolaus Black Elk Selected Poems, Robinson Jeffers Earth Household, Technical Notes and Queries To Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries, Gary Snyder Break The Mirror, Nanao Sakaki Pretty Shield, as told to Frank Einderman The Changing Face o f the Unknown, Victor Eieberman (unpublished) Introduction: 22"** Annual Wilderness Lecture Series The Poetics of Wilderness Roger Dunsmore There are a number of places to start to supply a context for this lecture series if one simply picks up the daily newspaper here, the Missoulian. or in any town in the U.S. One could start with the announcement Sunday of plans to clone human beings, to be offered “only to couples who cannot bear children.” Or with the five prominent bills drafted by a “working group” of industry representatives of real estate, timber, trade groups, and mining to “reform” or “streamline” (we might say, “significantly weaken”) the Montana Environmental Policy Act of 1971, a “landmark Montana Environmental law designed to help determine whether and under what conditions a proposed project such as a mine, a timber sale, or a land exchange goes forward,” that are under consideration during the legislative session in Helena right now. We could point to the person that our non- President has selected for his Secretary of Interior, Gale Norton, Ms. National Eead, Inc. We could consider the impact on the fisheries of the Pacific Northwest of the energy debacle in California, as power conglomerates increase water flows through hydro- electric generators on our major rivers, lowering stream flows below levels necessary to maintain wild fish populations. But this wilderness lecture series was planned before the most recent elections last fall, which brought to power those for whom the wild environment far too often means postcard perfect picture windows looking out on their favorite mountain- scape, and resources to be developed for jobs. It will most likely be a difficult time for the wild, and an active constituency for wild lands, wild species, and wild thinking is more necessary now than ever. But I want to start with an item about high- tech research from the January 19*, 2001 Missoulian. MANIPUEATING EIGHT, PHYSICISTS STOP PARTICEES Physicists say they have brought light particles to a screeching halt, then revved them up again so that they could continue their journey at a blistering 186,000 miles per second. The results are the latest in a growing number of experiments that manipulate light, the fastest and most ephemeral form of energy in the universe. Eventually, researchers hope toharness its speedy properties in the development of more powerful computers and other technologies thatstore information in light particles rather than electrons. The experiments were conducted in separate laboratories in Cambridge, Mass. by groups ...of Harvard and the Rowland Institute of Science...and... the Harvard- Smithsonian Institute of Astrophysics. (Emphasis added.) This sort of news item is not all that unusual these days. Our children and grandchildren will live in a history where the “harnessing” and “manipulation” of the physical universe, including the genetic material of all forms of life, including human life, will be ongoing at an ever increasing rate and touted as “for the benefit of all humankind.” In fact, we already inhabit such a history. One is reminded of Heidigger’s comment, in reference to the explosion of the first A-bomb, that the “terrible has already happened” in our hearts and minds long before it was physically expressed in the bomb. The irony of this fact is that technology itself will increasingly create its own “wilderness” area as we try to respond to the social, political and moral implications of its so- called advances. I want to set this news item and its implications for our history before us as a reference point as we inquire into the wilderness theme this semester. And I would like to suggest that one aspect of the wild is this energy within human beings to understand and control their environment. Neither the speed of light nor the gene pool itself are safe from the wild desire to bring it all under our domination. Our desires themselves are a form of wildness. The historian, social critic, and founder of cco- psychology, Theodor Rozak, in his 1992 book.The Voice o f the Earth, defines ecology as “the science of connections.” We seem to be fairly well along to understanding the nature of connections in biology, in the web of life of which we are a part. But there are other sorts of connections that are much less understood or valued: for instance, the connection between wilderness and civilization. In this particular binary it is extremely difficult not to set up a response wherein civilization and wilderness are opposed, where we feel drawn towards the “purity” and “naturalness” of wilderness and away from the commercialization, competition and pollution of civilization, at least here in Montana. Quoting from a recent article in the Wild Duck Review by our first speaker, Florence Shepard, however, we find a different perspective on this connection: “Paul Shepard saw quite early in his work that the opposite of wilderness is not civilization; the opposite of wilderness is domestication, the process by which gene combinations in living organisms have been interrupted and redesigned for cultural purposes. Civilization, on the other hand, is a condition of society including arts and sciences and the accouterments of a culture.” This way of re- envisioning the connection between wilderness and civilization so that they are not necessarily opposed permits us to take a second look at cities. It could be argued that the connections are such that our wilderness areas will be only as healthy and sustainable as are our cities. I try to make this wilderness/city connection in my piece on the volcano and the river (which I’ll read later)— bringing it all back home to town. As our cities become ghettoized, left to impoverished minorities, filled with the noise of machines of all kinds, and layered over with the harsh dullness of concrete, a social, economic, spiritual structure is created wherein many of those who are able to do so leave the cities for the towns, for the rural areas, for the wild. The wild cannot withstand the pressure of the flight from crumbling cities. It will be overwhelmed unless our cities become beautiful and satisfying places to work, to live, and to raise our families. The abandonment of the cities goes hand in hand with the turning of wilderness experience into yet another commodity to be bought and sold in the marketplace of overconsumption. Gary Snyder, writing about East Asia in his wonderfully inclusive essay, “Blue Mountains Constantly Walking,” puts it this way: “If Zen stands for the Far Eastern love of nature, Hang- zhou (the capital of the Southern Song Dynasty, China, 960- 1279 C.E.) stands for the ideal of the city. Both are brimming with energy and life. Because most of the cities of the world are now mired in poverty, overpopulation, and pollution we have all the more reason to recover the dream. To neglect the city (in our hearts and minds for starters) is deadly...'mountains and waters’ is a way to refer to the totality of the process of nature.

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