A LANDSCAPE OF WAR & PEACE
What does 9/11 mean for Nature?
In the late summer of 2001, I was living with my parents in the Cumberland Valley of Maryland. It is a landscape I know and love deeply. On September 11, that affinity shifted to anxiety and tragedy.
No planes crashed in that valley, but the trauma of lives lost in Washington, Pennsylvania, and New York could still be felt in the land.
Behind my parents’ house was a small regional airport used by Air Force One whenever the president was in the area. Most often, it was on the way to Camp David.
But a different type presidential retreat was not far off.
Raven Rock, known to locals as the Underground Pentagon, was just to the north in Pennsylvania. As a kid in the 1980s Cold War era, I knew it as a bunker for POTUS in the event of a nuclear attack on Washington.
This landscape, which incidentally lays right along the Mason-Dixon Line, held two possibilities in the national imagination on 9/11.
Camp David, a presidential retreat in the forests of Appalachia, represented hospitality and peace. It was a place for First Family vacations and international peace accords. Renewed by time in nature, it was believed, world leaders could rule more humanely.
Raven Rock, a cavernous military base deep inside a mountain, represented defense and war. It was a place of strategy and protection. In a hypothetical battle of nuclear annihilation, whoever survived the poisoned environment won.
Twenty-two years have passed since 9/11 and humanity’s appetite for war has not gone away. Neither has our conflict with the planet.
Will we head toward peace or war with Nature, of which Thoreau says, we are “a part and parcel”?
Our survival depends on all of us.
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