Editor's Note from 2023 May Networker

Take off, take off your shoes
This place you're standing, it’s holy ground

Perhaps more famously done by Wilco and Billy Bragg, the band the Klezmatics also mined Woody Guthrie’s archive of lyrics that he himself never recorded. As a Variety piece said in 2003, “each dip into the trove continues to unearth fascinating treasures.” This song, Holy Ground, on an album called Wonder Wheel, was born during Guthrie’s life on Mermaid Avenue in Coney Island, New York.

Every spot it’s holy ground
Every little inch it’s holy ground
Every grain of dirt it’s holy ground
Every spot I walk it’s holy ground

I used to spontaneously sing this song to myself when I was a runner, keeping to the ragged edges of the semi-rural roads where I live; edges that are often kind of... unsightly. (I had to look down a lot so I wouldn’t slip on ice or a rock or fall in a pothole; the view was otherwise lovely.) Broken pavement meeting gravel and dirt and occasionally trash, meeting dirty snow or whatever is brave enough to grow adjacent (fortunately blooming, with variations on that unique roadside palette, for at least half the year). Nevertheless it wasn’t once lost on me that this too, as Woody Guthrie wrote, is holy ground, and I was fortunate to have it under my feet. 

I’m confident that all three authors in this edition of the Networker would feel the same. SEHN is beyond excited and eager to share with you the first reprint of a 2014 essay by our esteemed Board member, Rebecca Altman. “On What We Bury,” originally published in ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment, reflects, gorgeously and movingly, on our personal and collective relationships with what lies beneath our feet.

We ask the Earth to take what we bury and to give us the solace that comes from cyclical transformation of dormancy and death into transformation or new life. And yet, we also open the Earth and bury what we’ve wasted, or what we want to hide, and then bury the thought of it.

The piece is bookended by experiences Rebecca shared together with our executive director, Carolyn Raffensperger. They go back a long way. Fittingly, Carolyn has written a complementary essay on the occasion of this reprint. She thinks back to one of those shared experiences and links it to a Summit from which she just now returned, continuing the work of establishing and upholding the legal rights of nature and those of future generations. The title of her piece, “A Legacy of Places Not Destroyed,” hints at a phenomenal idea she presents.

In her regular column, The rePercussion Section, SEHN senior scientist Sandra Steingraber provides an assist with our maybe-forgotten high school chemistry (as well as some important and disturbing history) to trace a path we also need to understand, between fracking and… food. 

Thank you for reading and for joining us in our efforts to respect every inch of the ground we walk, as well as what is above and below. 

Carmi Orenstein, MPH
CHPNY Program Director, SEHN