kudzu telegraph

A few weeks ago I sat through a Spartanburg County Council meeting about land use planning. It was a special session to hear ideas from other communities. The guest that day was a former administrator from Berkeley County who had successfully guided it through a transition to zoning and planned growth. I sat quietly in the back and took notes. Many of those surrounding me were developers, true believers with strong opinions about land use.

Today I'll begin teaching a humanities class for Wofford first-year students called "Into the Wild." We'll read a number of stories and essays about approaching wildness, books like John Krakauer's "Into the Wild," the story of Chris McCandless and his retreat from civilization and tragic death in wilds of Alaska.

I understand special interest groups are hard at work alerting their membership about the series of meetings on zoning possibilities and changes to our Spartanburg County land use ordinances.

I'd like to offer a few talking points of my own and focus on a small part of the changes under discussion with our county ordinances: stream-side buffers.

During last week's presidential forum broadcast from Saddleback Church in California I was stuck with pastor Rick Warren's use of the term "worldview." Warren, the author of the best selling self-help book THE PURPOSE DRIVEN LIFE, asked a battery of questions of both Barack Obama and John McCain that probed the framework of the candidates' ideas and beliefs.

One's worldview is the lens through which an individual interprets the world and interacts with it. Though it may look so, a worldview is not often a simple thing. It's something put together over time, built on countless encounters, decisions, mistakes, and surprises. A worldview is something carried forward by individuals, and those individuals in turn create cultures and nations.

A worldview changes over time as people change their minds. Though I don't think the Human Genome Project has located it, there could even be a genetic component for worldview.

Obama answered Warren's questions thoughtfully, and his worldview was full of nuance and complexity.  It was almost as if you were witnessing a conversation between friends who don't always agree, but know there is good reason to talk.

McCain seemed to me less interested in a conversation. He directed most of his answers not to Warren but to the larger audience.  "My friends," he started many answers. He was anecdotal. When he did respond directly to a question it was with certainty. He offered little nuance.

It was clear from this forum why we have an election every four years for president. Though there is probably one national worldview, candidates from different American parties can differ broadly on the details of the scene. Individuals can see the world though a very different lens.

As I listened to these three men discussing ideas and values I began to think about ways that I differed from them and ways that I am maybe the same. What's my worldview? How did I come to it? What has changed about it over the years?

My particular worldview reared its head the first time when I found myself uncomfortable that none of the questions Warren was asking was dealing directly with my central issues: energy and the environment. I wasn't that interested in the candidates' ideas about abortion, gay marriage, taxes, or which Supreme Court justice one or the other might vote off the island. I wanted to hear Obama and McCain talk about the relationship of human beings to the planet.

My own worldview came roaring forward to seize me when John McCain made what he thought was a funny joke about bear research: "My friends," I remember him saying, "There are biologists in Montana who are spending three million of your tax dollars studying the DNA of bears. Now I don't know if it's a paternity question or a criminal question…"

I admit in retrospect the joke was funny, but with that statement McCain's worldview and my worldview collided, and I left the room. What he said made me mad. There was energy in the collision. It got my attention in a way very little either candidate said that night did.

If you read this column on a weekly basis there's no need to explain why John McCain's bear joke rubbed me the wrong way. Maybe it was because that very week George Bush had gutted the Endangered Species Act. Maybe it was that the joke was anti-intellectual, and at its core is a distrust of science. My worldview takes science very seriously, especially environmental science.

Last weekend we took a spin 30 miles west of town in what, when I was a child, we always called "the mountains."  We never even called it "the mountain front," and it was only after I took geology in college that I learned to refer to it as "the Blue Ridge Escarpment."

Last Tuesday my friend Chris Dickey called to say he was at a Bojangles on I-26 in the middle of a late-afternoon chicken snack. He and two of his journalist colleagues, videographer Lee Wang and photographer Seamus Murphy, were headed to Spartanburg on the last leg of their 10-day, modern-day "Sherman's March" through the South.