Restoring Nature, Restoring Yourself by Francesca Lyman
Given months to live and told to find a hobby, a disabled Vietnam veteran turned to restoring the polluted creek behind his house. The effort saved his life For a man broken by war, John Beal found himself an unlikely place of
refuge. Hamm Creek was an open sewer, plugged up with garbage.
Photo by Joel Sackett
The disabled Vietnam veteran hadn't known where to turn. Told that he
had less than four months to live and advised by his doctor to find a
hobby to take his mind off his pain and suffering, he wandered down to
the stream behind his house to contemplate his future. He stood on the
shores of a backwater tributary of the Duwamish River, a dredged
shipping channel on the outskirts of Seattle, edged by concrete
factories and laced with toxic waste.
He was still recovering from bullet wounds and haunted by flashbacks.
Besides suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, he had gone
through three heart attacks, followed by a serious motorcycle accident.
"I went down to the stream behind my house and just cried, wondering
how I'd care for my wife and four kids," says Beal. "Then the idea came
to me: If you're going to check out, so to speak, try to leave this
place better than it was when you found it. I looked at this wreck of a
stream, filled with refrigerators, computers, old tires, torn garbage
bags, broken swing sets, and stinking carpets, and all I wanted to do
was clean it up."
Maybe it was a way of processing his memories of the wreckage of war,
he admits. Maybe it was survivor's guilt. Or maybe his doctor's advice
propelled him. Instead of despairing, he started simply pulling out the
garbage. "When I yanked out this huge refrigerator, I thought it would
surely kill me. Instead I felt better."
Since that day 23 years ago, Beal has directed all of his energies to
cleaning up and restoring this polluted stream flowing out of Seattle's
industrial south end. During the last ten years he has moved on to
restoring the entire watershed of which it is a part.
"John really deserves credit for realizing that the Duwamish River and
its estuaries could be restored to health, at a time when many people
had written off the urbanized Duwamish as a lost cause," says Kathy
Fletcher, executive director of The People for Puget Sound, a citizen's
organization that involves local citizens in protecting and restoring
local streams.
Beal has recruited hundreds of crews to clean up and replant around the
streams and has now established a network of volunteer groups living in
the area, as well as drawing the support and interest of the local
Duwamish tribe.
Through sheer persistence, and with the help of groups like People for
Puget Sound, Beal eventually raised enough public awareness and
pressure to persuade the local utility to allow Hamm Creek, which had
been channelized and paved into a culvert, to be daylighted and
rerouted over its property.
"The most dramatic thing is how quickly the creek began reviving,"
Fletcher says, adding that within days of a huge effort to daylight and
replant the area little salmonids began appearing. What was once a
culvert dripping with waste is now a beautifully recontoured and
replanted stream brimming with beaver, salmon, and other fish.
For Beal, the impulse to do environmental restoration is itself
restorative: "It has empowered me and kept me alive." That same impulse
has spurred the energies of thousands of volunteers. "I've seen
remarkable things happen to people who connect with Mother Earth," he
concludes, describing dozens of cases of people disabled physically or
psychologically who benefit from the exercise and feeling of
accomplishment. "They see a light go on when they get here."
"I remember watching a young man who had been in a wheelchair for eight
years come out to help us weed and plant," he says. "After two years,
he's almost able to walk." At first, the disabled man would fall out of
his wheelchair, Beal recalls. But now, he says, the man is able to
clamber down the slope of the shore, willing himself through. "He was
out there every single day. And lately he's saying, ‘Now I've got a
mission in life.'"
No matter how stressed, angry, depressed or troubled they are, whether
it's a jail crew sent to clean up litter for the day or a class of
disabled students, they seem to derive pleasure from the activity, says
the riverkeeper.
The redemptive feelings Beal describes are echoed by thousands of
visitors and volunteers who have come to his restored creeksite. They
are also confirmed by an emerging movement loosely called
"ecopsychology," the study of nature's therapeutic benefits.
Look around, says Michael Cohen, founder of a hands-on wilderness
therapy course called Project Nature Connect. People long to be put
back into nature, crave having their lives fit into some ancient order.
For evidence, one need look no further than the widespread reaction of
Americans in the wake of the September 11 terror attacks, he notes.
Compelled to go to a place that would ease their shock and sadness,
many instinctively flocked to city parks, flower gardens, overlooks,
and other natural areas.
Nothing could have been less surprising to John Beal. After the
September 11 attacks, he recalls turning to his wife and saying, "Hamm
Creek's going to be a lot busier now. The entire US will be going
through post-traumatic stress disorder."
In the last decade, hundreds of studies have begun documenting what
many people know intuitively about the healing power of nature. "Nature
is in some fundamental way important for the human psyche, and as such
it is really central to public health," says Roger Ulrich, director of
the Center for Health Systems and Design at Texas A&M University. A
pioneer in the field, Ulrich has tested these theories on patients
recovering from cardiac and abdominal surgery. He found that patients
whose hospital rooms overlooked trees required less pain medication and
recovered more quickly than those whose rooms overlooked brick walls.
John Beal, like the ecopsychologists, believes that the impulse toward
environmental restoration is about the need for connection and purpose
in a world increasingly disassociated from nature. "It's the connection
to something larger than yourself," says Beal. "When you are so
overwhelmed by your depression, or anxiety or sense of illness, it
takes away that worry; it calms that fear."
Francesca Lyman writes the Your Environment column for MSNBC online,
recently awarded the Society of Environmental Journalists' first prize
for online reportage
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