Writing Down to the Roots

Published in The Foxboro Reporter on 29 July 2002

By Jon Kohl

I was never content to stay on the surface.  Ever since Foxboro High where I edited both the newspaper (The Fox) and literary magazine (briefly called PG-13), my writing delved into the depths of big ideas.  Just look at some of the topics:  Nostradamus, slime molds, the First Amendment, proof of God, Battleship Bismarck, marine biomedicine, mutual assured destruction, stupidity.  At Dartmouth College, I founded an environmental electronic magazine and wrote continuously on the environment.  Professor and environmental writer Dana Meadows helped to show me that big ideas, paradigms she said they were called, lay at the root of our behavior, our way of looking at the world.  I understood that, but did not descend too far into the well.  I threw rocks down, as Morpheo suggested in The Matrix, just to hear how deep they would go.  But I never heard a splash.

So in 1992 when I presented myself with two roads from which to choose (see graphic created in 1992), I suffered a hard choice:  I could go into magazine writing and editing and help the environment through ideas or into international development and help using my hands.

            I joined the Peace Corps in Costa Rica in 1993 assigned to the education department at the National Zoo.  I was still writing (13 publications in 1994), but soon the hands-on work of teaching children and developing natural history materials pushed out the writing.  Later after graduate school, RARE Center for Tropical Conservation hired me to manage a nature guide training program; again I was teaching, managing people and logistics.  My writing got left behind, hitting its nadir in 1998 with merely two publications.

            In 1999 I expanded my activities beyond just bilingual nature guide training.  I worked on our low-impact, interpretive trails program and founded the Public Use Planning Program, designed to help parks develop and implement their strategic visitor management plans.  In all cases we help our partner parks in Latin America to develop capacities to better manage visitors. 

But as my experience grew, I began to realize I had been working mostly on the surface.  I descended a little ways down into the well.  I began to see that many problems we fight with technical solutions have deeper roots, almost invariably leading back to the North, especially the United States.

Our operating assumption as we work to promote ecotourism is that visitors from developed countries will come and that can’t be stopped.  They will come to the most sensitive, sacred places and that can’t be stopped.  So let’s prepare our colleagues for that destiny.  International market forces, big-money lobbying, military influence all drive our work just as they drive many other threats to tropical wildlife such as banana production, logging, industrialization.  The battle we wage is deeply connected to the North; its roots go much deeper into the well than just the technical solutions most conservation and development organizations provide.

As I started to think about these, I began to write again.  In 2000, I jumped to 13 publications, covering topics such as how international donors fund visitor centers as monuments rather than as true development tools.  I wrote about how Honduras needs to learn lessons from its experience with Hurricanes Fifi (1972) and Mitch (1998), by overcoming various political obstacles. 

But it was not until 2001 (14 publications) that my life turned to the well with a one-two punch.  First came human cloning.  Science marches without moral restraint, developing any and all technology, for better or worse, without any societal veto.  Since technology represents one key component of development, I wanted to start writing on this topic.  Then came September 11.  This singular event shook all the environmental writers in a writing frenzy, like an incensed hive of Africanized bees.  They wrote about international governance, international development, the connection between human rights, environmental deterioration, and our economic-political system and how it affects the world.

But since I was in the midst of writing up a demanding technical manual (on the surface), I couldn’t participate.  I felt like all my friends just went to the best party of the year and I had to stay home and study.

Meadows died in February 2001 but her message rang strong.  To solve problems of development, environment, terrorism, public health, you have to look at the problems as a system of interconnected factors.  You can treat factors individually, such as deforestation with ecotourism; or you can go deeper and try to change the system’s rules (laws), or still deeper and change the system’s objectives which establish laws (economic growth), or you can go very deep into the well, and change the paradigms behind the objectives (development means converting nature into individual wealth).

The deeper you go the harder the mission.  Socrates explained it well with his Myth of the Cave.  He said most of us see only shadows dancing on the cave wall.  Human-made objects cast these shadows, human ideas illuminate them, in a human-created cave.  Only very few people every make it out of the cave to see the sunlight on the other side.  Most people don’t have the reasoning skills to get there.

The only way to fight ideas, then, is with ideas.  The challenge is like that of a prosecutor.  She spends a lifetime putting away a killer, only to see another in his place.  No matter how many she puts away, she has done nothing to change the base reasons causing killers in the first place.  The same is true engaging loggers or developers.  Behind the system, ideas pulsate, working their behavioral magic.

            To fight them you need a critical mind, communication skills, and an attraction for abstraction.  Not everyone has the weaponry to battle paradigms.  Often the combatants use the sword instead of the pen.  The President attacks terrorists, but not the ideas behind them.  Until their paradigm changes or his, more terrorists will come.

            I’m now preparing an expedition down into the well, requiring my return to the US where the discussions and many big ideas originate. I am going deeper and deeper into the dark well, illuminated only by the light of a few good ideas.  And the only thing dark enough to snuff out that light, are closed minds that cannot set old ideas free.

Jon drew up this graphic in June 1992 before graduating Dartmouth College.  Since then, he followed the left path almost perfectly.  He spent the 1992 summer working at the Wellfleet Bay Wildlife Sanctuary on Cape Cod, spent nearly a year at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, spent two years in the Peace Corps in Costa Rica (1993–5), then got his master’s at the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in Connecticut (1995–7), went to work with RARE Center for 3.5 years in Honduras and 1.5 years in Guatemala, applied and was accepted to two doctoral program during that time (but didn’t go), and now is trying to transition to the right column (1997 to present).

Biography

Jon Kohl, son of Adele Kohl of 45 Baker Street and Peter Kohl of Windham, NH graduated from Foxboro High in 1988.  His first non-high school article ran in The Foxboro Reporter on 16 June 1988, “Van Halen’s strategy to be best of bunch,” when we paid him $30 to review the Monsters of Rock concert at the late Sullivan Stadium.  This article represents his 142^st life publication.  Jon will be moving to the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point in August to accompany his Costa Rican significant other, who will be getting her Master’s degree.