Cycling, science diplomacy, and the fresh water crisis

Shared Borders Shared Waters: Israeli-Palestinian and Colorado River Basin Water Challenges by Sharon B. Megdal, Robert G. Varady, and Susanna Eden (CRC Press, 2013)

Of course, I gave my permission when Susanna Eden, PhD, asked if she could use my photo of the San Pedro River as cover art on a new book entitled Shared Borders Shared Waters. I had taken the picture from the bridge on Arizona Highway 82 near Tombstone, while bicycling through the region on PAC Tour’s desert camp. Later, I had used it on blogs about roads and rivers in Southern Arizona.

Eden and two colleagues at the University of Arizona were editing a forthcoming book on Israeli-Palestinian and Colorado River Basin Water Challenges. My photo would be paired with one of the Jordan River. My photo, by the way, is the one on the lower right corner of the book.

Since I have always thought of myself as a writer rather than a photographer, I was surprised by the request and therefore all the readier to give my consent.

Furthermore, the topic of their book interests me greatly. While living in Arizona for several post-retirement years, and as I continue cycling there during the winters, I have become increasingly aware of the history of crises because of water in the arid Southwest. My one tour of Israel and Palestine (West Bank and Gaza) alerted me to the impending ecological, political, and human crisis that is forming in that region because of the limited supply of fresh water.

Eden and her colleagues show the similarity of the Arizona-Mexico and Israel-Palestine ecosystems and the resultant issues over fresh water. Cycling through places like Arizona and West Texas, where the pressures are mounting quickly gives me a heightened awareness of the challenges facing human society everywhere. In a land with little precipitation, limited aquifers, and rapidly growing population, something has to give.

The book is based on the Arizona, Israeli, and Palestinian Water Management and Policy Workshop that too place at the University of Arizona in Tucson in 2009. Sponsors included UNESCO’s International Hydrological Programme and three centers at the University: the Water Resources Research Center, the Arizona Center for Judaic Studies, and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies. Financial support came from several sources.

Since my copy of Shared Borders Shared Waters has just arrived, I have had time to read only a few pages. Clearly, it is a substantial book, with chapters by thirty contributors from around the world. At some point in the future, I will write more about the ideas, issues, and conclusions in the book.

It is a substantial volume, replete with charts, graphs, and photos, many in color. The “normal price” is $99.95, but if you order it before May 15, 2013, you can buy it for $79.00, with free shipping. Ordering information appears on the advertising card below.

One aspect of the book, which the editors call “science diplomacy,” is especially interesting to me. Here’ how they describe it:

“Across the world, the history of contentious water issues confirms that the resolution of such issues can engender collaboration rather than divisiveness. Experience has shown that researchers who are sensitive to sociopolitical conditions often can help avoid or resolve conflict by serving as neutral experts, offering assistance through reasoned, independent analysis” (p. xii).

This kind of science we need. And more diplomacy like this, too!

A new American church for a world groaning in travail

The era in which the Consultation on Church Union began its work to remake the church and the nation

The decade of the 1950s was a moment in America when two cultural forces were coming together like tectonic plates. By the end of the decade, major systems in American life were experiencing tremors that presaged a more dramatic revolution than most people—especially those in leadership positions—could have imagined.

When the tremors came, a natural response was to hold things together until the shaking ceased and then to shore up the systems where vulnerabilities had been revealed. A more imaginative response by a few church leaders was to acknowledge that something much more substantial needed to be done. New systems able to withstand the shaking America’s institutions would have to be devised.

One of these efforts was the movement to unite nine ecumenical protestant churches at the center of American life and culture. Although the intended merger of existing denominations did not take place, the unity movement impacted American churches and culture.

As part of my research on the history of this movement—the Consultation on Church Union—I have written a description of that period when the United States was undergoing radical change. To read the essay, click New Church – World Groaning

Still looking for the right tires

Jan Heine Measuring Speed

My first serious adult bike (an entry level Raleigh, circa 1971) had 27 in wheels with gum wall tires that carried 75 psi pressure. I was happy with this “high performance” arrangement until I visited Bud’s Bike Shop while teaching in a summer session in Claremont, California. There I saw (and bought) skin wall tires that became my standard from that time forward.

I soon upgraded my bike and started using 700 cc wheels with presta valves. For many years 23 mm tires, with folding bead, pumped to 120 psi were my normal equipment. This arrangement, I believed, was a nice compromise between high performance and high dependability. Except for the steady rise in price, I was content.

Then I started reading Bicycle Quarterly, edited and published by Jan Heine in Seattle. With an earlier career in racing and continuing active involvement in top-level randonneuring, Jan knew bicycle technology and performance very well, both in the United States and in Europe. He and his cycling friends in Seattle were especially interested in the design and performance of classic European road bikes.

I was surprised by the conclusions they were drawing concerning the effect of tire width and pressure upon performance and comfort. Contrary to conventional wisdom, skinny tires (20 and 23 mm), pumped to pressures well above 120 psi did not contribute to fast times except in highly specialized conditions.

On the open roads where most of us ride, even when racing, wider and softer tires are actually faster. They support their conclusions with carefully documented procedures for timing the performance of tires of various sizes and types by well-known manufacturers.

As a result of their studies, I changed how I equip my bikes. On my classic Mercian, which I unwisely modified fifteen years ago, the largest I can carry are 25 mm. On my Waterford winter bike, I use 32 mm tires, and on my Davidson I am currently riding 28 mm but have been thinking of changing to 30 or 32.

The new issue of Bicycle Quarterly (Spring 2013) updates the studies that the Seattle group has been doing. It contains ten articles on the general topic of tire performance. Some of them revise and republish earlier reports. The writers compare clinchers and tubulars, the effect of tread on speed, the comparative performance of specific tires on smooth vs. rough roads, and the effect of “drop” on performance.

Although I do not fully understand the technical material that is included in some of the entries, I come away with four conclusions.

First, there are measurable differences in performance of tires related to materials out of which they are made, their design, their weight, and the pressure they carry. The combination of these factors interacts with road surfaces so that some tires are measurably faster under some circumstances than under others.

Second, for most cyclists the variations are hard to discern under normal cycling conditions. Several of the essays in this issue carry statements similar to this paragraph from “Choosing the Correct Tire Pressure.”

“Fortunately, tire pressure makes only a small difference in tire performance. It is far more important to choose your tires well. Once you have mounted supple high-performance tires on your bike, then you don’t need to worry much about pressure” (p. 44).

Third, several factors affect how fast cyclists can ride and how long they can stay in the saddle. At this stage in my cycling career, the benefits of wider and softer tires, light weight and supple in design, are increasingly persuasive.

Fourth, tires with these characteristics are also reliable on the road. Of course, flats are always possible given the character of streets and highways, but tires that combine comfort and performance are probably more resistant to punctures than the skinny, high-pressure tires I used to ride.

I want to bicycle in carefree fashion, which means, in part, that I don’t want to worry about my tires. Even checking pressure is a bother. That’s why I like the way Jan concludes one of his essays. There are no “hard and fast rules,” he writes.

“On my own bike, the tire pressure changes over time, because I only inflate my tires when the pressure obviously has become too low. As it turns out, that seems to put me right into the sweet spot of tire pressure” (p. 44).

And that’s the very spot in which I want to ride! 

The Disappearance of Church Religion

Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society (New York: Macmillan, 1967).

Even on Easter Sunday people don’t go to church the way they used to. Some give as their reason that they aren’t religious. Others that they are spiritual but with a spirituality that does not need institutional expression. Others may be willing to engage in religious practices and patterns of devotion but believe that churches no longer provide an effective form of public ceremony.

Whatever the reason, it is accurate to declare that church religion is disappearing. The challenge for all of us, whether or not we participate in church religion, is to understand the phenomenon we experience around us.

For me, the place to begin is a book that was published nearly half a century ago by Thomas Luckmann, professor of sociology at the University of Frankfurt and for a time a faculty member of the New School for Social Research.

He entitled his book The Invisible Religion:The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. Luckmann wrote that the focus of studies in his discipline tended to be “church religion,” the forms of religious observance that take place within the framework of specialized religious institutions. Because church religion was declining in Europe and the United States, many of his colleagues were concluding that religion itself was disappearing.

Not so, Luckmann asserted. Instead, people were expressing their religion—which he defined as “the transcendence of biological nature by the human organism”—in a new, non-institutional way.

As I understand this idea, it is that a human being is more than an ongoing complex of biological and psychological experiences. Each person interacts with others and in the process becomes aware of oneself and of everything else. One’s past, present, and future are integrated into “a socially defined, morally relevant biography.” Each of us embarks with others to construct an “’objective’ and moral universe of meaning. Therefore the organism transcends its biological nature” (49).

One of the most important aspects of this religious process is taking into oneself a world view, which Luckmann defined as “an encompassing system of meaning in which socially relevant categories of time, space, causality and purpose are superordinated to more specific schemes in which reality is segmented and the segments are related to one another” (53).  Although world views could be developed individually, this rarely happens because the “universe-constructing activities of successive generations. . .is immeasurably greater than  that of individual streams of consciousness” (52).

Central to Luckmann’s thesis is the fact that in the modern world all institutions become sharply specialized, each dealing with its specific area of responsibility. No institution, including the religious, can unite all of the other perspectives and connect them authoritatively to the sacred cosmos. Because life experiences change more rapidly than institutions, however, churches and other religious institutions lose their potency. Their message is experienced as rhetoric rather than as essential and authoritative explanations of the objective world.

Furthermore, this rhetoric is understood as important only in private matters and has no bearing upon the values and norms of the other domains of life such as economics and politics. In their religious development, individuals act as consumers, accepting only those elements they find meaningful.

Although a once dominant religious worldview can lose its dominance, its central themes and values linger in the society and are incorporated into the religious identities that people develop for themselves. Even in a society where two thirds of the people are non-observant in religious institutions, the themes from those institutions continue to be part of the commonly affirmed religious values and life practices.

Luckmann offered four questions for students of religion to consider: 1) What norms do determine the priorities of people? 2) What systems provide the “overarching, sense-integrating function in contemporary life?” 3) How clearly are they linked to individual systems of ultimate significance and to social roles and positions? 4) To what extent is official religion being internalized and what is its relevance to systems of ultimate significance in contemporary life? (91).

While the church religion that once was central to European and American life is disappearing, and the religious function is more personalized than once was the case, it is unlikely that human societies can exist as fully individualized conglomerations of people who do not share norms and patterns of life.

Institutions will continue to emerge and participate in shaping human values, patterns, and practices. If the Christian faith continues to lead people to “life abundant,” it will be because revised forms of church religion will emerge.

What will they be? And how can those who lead churches now participate in shaping these new forms? These are the questions for leaders of churches during these post-Easter days.

One more trip to Bisbee

Bicycling is a way of traveling that encourages people to spend time in places they ride through: to look around at the distinctive buildings, meander down quiet streets, savor the character of coffee shops, talk with people who live there. This kind of cycling, as John R. Stilgoe explains in his book Outside Lies Magic, is a liberal art because it liberates and often reveals secrets about the built environment in which we live.

Some cyclists, and I’m one of them, wonder about the history of places we pass through. We look for bookstores and local museums where we can learn the story of how these places came to be the way they are.

When traveling with tour groups, however, we are pushed by the schedule and tied to the designated route. There is little time to explore these interesting places. Even when I’m traveling on my own, the thicker story of these places often comes only after I’ve ridden through them and have done the research that I should have done before the trip.

The importance of learning about places before the trip has come clear to me as I read about Bisbee, Arizona. Even though I’ve bicycled to Bisbee, this unique mountain community, five times during the past fifteen years, I have failed until now to discover how this old little place came to be the way it is.

The door into Bisbee’s past was opened for me by Richard Shelton’s award-winning book Going Back to Bisbee, which he published in 1992. I already knew that Bisbee was largely the creation of the copper industry, which flourished in southern Arizona in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Shelton, however, explains the industry’s history. He characterizes the social and economic layers of Bisbee’s people over the years, coming as they did from several parts of Europe and continuing many of their old-world patterns. Shelton also describes the economic vulnerability of the town and its people because of the volatility of the one industry upon which everyone depended. It is a hard story.

He helps us understand the challenges that come from building a community along the sides of steep canyons. Obviously, it takes strong legs, lungs, and heart to clamber up and down from one level to another. What should have been obvious, but had failed to register in my mind, was how vulnerable the town is to flooding because of these steep canyons that flow together into the main canyon where Bisbee’s central district is located.

Until reading Shelton, I knew nothing about the history of fires in Bisbee and the successive rebuilding of the town until finally a more fire resistant set of central buildings came into being.

Despite Shelton’s deep personal attachment to Bisbee and the romantic glow that he has infused into this text, Bisbee’s past remained largely a collection of facts until I read Conrad Richter’s novel Tacey Cromwell, published in 1942. Even knowing about this book I owe to Shelton who cites it a few times in his volume.

The story revolves four people whose lives unfold over a twenty-year period in Bisbee that is climaxed by a great fire, probably modeled after a conflagration that occurred in 1908. Tacey Cromwell, a prostitute from New Mexico who wants to start a new life, and her companion Gaye Oldaker, bring “Nugget” his eight-year-old runaway half brother with them and establish residence on O.K. Street on Youngblood Hill.

Soon after they arrive, a mine disaster kills their neighbor, a widower with infant son and eight-year-old daughter “Seely” who now are destitute. Tacey takes them in. The novel describes the systematic way in which Tacey molds all four of them into lives that are consistent with the patterns of the upper class people in town.

The crises around which the story unfolds are caused by the rigidity of the “better” people and their unwillingness to accept Tacey because of her former way of life. It is a somber book that in some ways ends the way it begins, with Tacey and Seely, Gaye and Nugget together again.

As we follow Seely and Nugget in their fast trips up and down stairways, over fences and walls, through yards, and across dangerous spaces, we begin to sense the precariousness of Bisbee’s geography. As we listen to the conversations with neighbors and townspeople, we hear various half-Englished dialects and recognize the sure signs of prejudicial attitudes among the more established layers of the social order. The Bisbee that I have experienced as a built environment becomes a multi-layered human community.

Now that I’m beginning to understand this strange place, I want to go back one more time, when I’m on my own schedule. The trip should include a night at the Copper Queen Hotel, with plenty of time for meandering.

One more trip to Bisbee! Maybe next year.

America’s last plan for church union

COCU’s Final Documents

On a blustery day in early spring, I decided to stay off of my bicycle and instead complete the second draft of my current research project, which is to write a history of the last effort to develop a comprehensive plan for church union in the United States.

I am using the word last in two senses. One is that the Consultation on Church Union, as this 40-year venture was called, was last in that it was the most recent effort. The more important meaning of last is that it is unlikely that any other project of this kind is likely to be attempted during the lifetime of anyone capable of reading this blog.

It’s hard to comprehend what American church life would be like today if COCU, to use the acronym by which the Consultation was most widely known, had succeeded. Imagine a 25 million member Protestant church comprising Episcopal, Presbyterian, Methodist (four denominations), United Church of Christ, Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), and International Council of Community Churches branches Christianity!

There is much more work to do in order to complete this manuscript, which (at 400 words per page) would print out to about 175 pages). Not least of the tasks is to find a publisher (if you have ideas and influence, let me know). The detailed table of contents outlines the story line of this saga of American Protestant church life.

The American Church That Might Have Been: A History of the Consultation on Church Union, by Keith Watkins (Table of Contents of Second Draft)

Part One: Moving from Vision to Plan (1960—1970)

Chapter One: The Bold Proposal (“Jesus Christ, whom all of us confess as our divine Lord and Saviour, wills that his church be one”)             

• A Sermon to Transform the American Church
• Principles and Patterns for Christian Unity

Chapter Two: The Challenge to Reunion in Concrete Terms (If the churches are unwilling to give this proposal full seriousness, they are “abdicating their ecumenical responsibility”)

• Creating the Consultation on Church Union
• Developing the Theological Foundation for a New Church

Chapter Three: Second Thoughts on Church Union (Pressing on to become an instrument for peace and reconciliation across all boundaries of nation, race, and class)

• A Deeper Understanding of Ministry
• The Resurgence of Hope

Chapter Four: Principles of Church Union (“A more inclusive expression of the oneness of the Church of Christ than any of the participating churches can suppose itself alone to be” )   

• The Principles
• Enlarging the Enterprise

Chapter Five: Responding to Issues of Structure and Organization (“The law of man is secondary. We move today under command of the law of God”)

• Facing Organizational Challenges
• The Unification of Ministries
• Bringing Things Together in a Plan of Union

Chapter Six: At Last A Plan of Union (Whatever the decision may be, the lives of all of us will be changed  and the shape of the church will have been drastically altered)

• Following Christ to the Cross
• The Basic Elements of the Plan
• Deliberations and Actions

Part Two: Negotiating the Terms of Agreement (1971—1988 )

Chapter Seven: Reaching for Balance and Equilibrium (Still “the best hope for a reconciled, revitalized Christian community”)

• Empowering the Black Churches
• Reclaiming the Sacramental Center

Chapter Eight: Changing the Focus from Plan to Process (Consensus on theology but still searching for agreement on organization and structure)

• Paying Attention to What the Churches Had Said
• A Different Kind of Next Step

Chapter Nine: Moving Yet and Never Stopping (A consensus struggling to find expression)

• Dutifully Working at the Pragmatic Task
• Christian Unity and Racial Justice
• Consensus Struggling to Find Expression

Chapter Ten: The COCU Consensus (“A sufficient theological basis for  covenanting acts and the uniting process”)

• Something Like a Compass for the COCU Churches
• Second Revision, in Two Parts
• Adoption of the Theological Basis for Unity
• COCU at the Turning Point

Chapter Eleven: Churches in Covenant Communion (Pledging to walk together until we are visibly united in Christ)

• The Idea of Covenant Takes Shape
• Liturgies for Covenanting
• One More Time Around

Part Three: Watching the Vision Vanish Away (1989—2002)

Chapter Twelve: Churches Uniting in Christ (Like a grain of wheat, COCU falls into the ground and dies)

• The Responses by the Churches
• Searching for a Way Forward
• COCU Becomes CUIC

Chapter Thirteen: Continuing the Search for Christian Unity in America (The post-COCU agenda for the nation’s ecumenical protestant churches)

• What COCU Tried to Do
• Why This Venture Seemed So Promising
• Why COCU Lost Momentum
• COCU’s Achievements
• The Post-COCU Agenda for Ecumenical Protestant Churches in America
• Conclusion

 

Bicycling Back to Bisbee

Going Back to Bisbee, by Richard Shelton (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1992). This book won the 1992 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction.

Again this year my bike ride in Southern Arizona was an intellectual journey disguised as vigorous physical activity. It provided the incentive for reading about the historical, religious, and geographical territory through which I was cycling on week two of PAC Tour’s Winter Training Camp.

In an earlier blog (“A melancholy cyclist riding along the Santa Cruz River,” posted February 22, 2013) I reviewed a book, which I read before the trip, that interprets the history of the portion of the Sonoran Desert through which I would be cycling: The Lessening Stream, by environmental historian Michael F. Logan. This modest stream, scarcely 200 miles long, is one of the defining features of this year’s journey.

It is difficult to imagine how a book could differ from Logan’s more completely than the volume that I read during the ride itself: Going Back to Bisbee by poet and university professor Richard Shelton.

Whereas Logan’s self-avowed materialist point of view generated a strong sense of frustration and futility as I thought about the way that human activity has affected this desert river and its basin, Shelton’s personal narrative conveys a lilting sense of love for this arid river valley and its flora and fauna (including the people who have lived here over the centuries). Instead of melancholy, Shelton inspires joyful wonder.

Unlike Logan who grew up in Southern Arizona and moved away, Shelton first came to this country in 1956 as a draftee in the U.S. Army and has made this “baked land of chaotic hills and valleys” his home ever since.

Going Back to Bisbee begins on a monsoon summer day as Shelton drives his old van from Tucson to Bisbee—up the grade on AZ 83 to Sonoita, east on AZ 82 over the San Pedro River, south on AZ 80 through Tombstone, and onward over Mule Pass to Bisbee. It takes 319 pages of beautifully crafted prose for this poet-English professor to fill in details about the drive itself and the many associations that it brings to mind.

He describes the character of the Arizona monsoon season, portrays the strange beauty of yucca and other “stand-up-straight” desert plants that thrive in this dry land that has two rainy seasons. Shelton gives a detailed account of the ferocity of the marauding Apaches who terrorized this land for three hundred years.

His accounts of ghost towns in Southern Arizona are based on his own scrambles through the desolate places where crude piles of rain-destroyed adobe, now overpowered by mesquite thickets, are all that remain.

Whereas Logan stands back from his subject, trying to describe it with analytical objectivity, Shelton draws close, embracing this strange place with love. What Wordsworth said of poetry can be ascribed to Going Back to Bisbee. It “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility.”

As Shelton drives through fields overrun with cholla cacti, he explains in full detail the particularly painful characteristics of this desert plant. When he stops to watch a handsome coyote lazing along a pool of water in a canyon, he provides an extended discussion of the remarkable family life of coyotes and, as an extended aside, the ill-fated romance between one of his own dogs and a coyote from the Tucson hills.

Bisbee

The deep humanity of Shelton’s narrative is most fully expressed in the last third of the book in which he describes the geographical, architectural, and human history of Bisbee itself where he taught school for two years immediately after his two-year stint at Fort Huachuca.

The sensitive portraits of his junior high students during the late 1950s inspire confidence in the teaching profession. Shelton describes the complex ethnic mix of Bisbee’s neighborhoods and explains how the culture of copper mining has created this town that “never grew up, just got older and older.”

As religious historian, I was especially interested in Shelton’s characterization of Bisbee as caught between the hardships of life and the terrors of a Calvinist God, both of which were brought to Bisbee by the Phelps Dodge mining company.

The hardships of life, manifested in Brewery Gulch and the many brothels of earlier times, are self evident because of the rigors and dangers of mining and its destructive impact upon geography and the ecosystem, and also the fluctuations between prosperity and privation that are characteristic of a mining economy.

Less obvious is the religious side of the contrast, represented by Bisbee’s Presbyterian Church. The Phelps-Dodge-James family consisted of New England Calvinists, who brought their theology and their desire for order and propriety to this town that their company controlled.

Neither side of the social conflict won, and the Bisbee that Shelton remembers in the late 1980s, when he writes this book, contains ample evidence of both elements still living in tension.

Most of what Shelton tells us in this book was new to me, even though I have bicycled through this land several times. And now, having read this travel narrative, I am inspired to follow Shelton’s example by going back to Bisbee one more time.