A Song in the Night Read Online Free PDF Page B

came home crestfallen, I seethed.

    At the age of eight, I learned that a large utility company, Consolidated Edison, had filed plans to build an immense hydroelectric storage facility on top of Storm King Mountain, a historic peak on the shore of the Hudson River in the Catskills, just a few miles north of West Point. The engineers planned to create a vast industrial storage tank into which water would be pumped at night, when electricity rates were low, and then that water would be released during the day to generate power through gravity-fed turbines. We had been on a school field trip to those breathtaking places—Storm King, Bear Mountain. I instinctively objected to the idea of destroying all of this to build a power plant.
    Indeed, the battle over Storm King, which roiled the courts from the mid-1960s until 1980, was one of the earliest environmental legal fights—so early, in fact, that the term “environmentalism” did not exist, nor was the field of “environmental law” even recognized. At the time people who objected to thedestruction of public beauty for private gain were known as “conservationists.” Back then it was not a partisan issue; the nation’s leading conservationists had included two Republican governors of New York, Theodore Roosevelt and Nelson Rockefeller. As the project advanced, citizens in the area, including the well-known Hudson Valley historian Carl Carmer and his wife, Betty, who lived in a huge and whimsical octagon-shaped house across the street from us, began to organize.
    I wrote letters and drew pictures and mailed them off to the president of the United States and to national school newsletters, one of which printed them. The president sent me an autographed picture—which thrilled me—but did not comment on the dispute itself. As it turned out, the Scenic Hudson project, of which Storm King was a major component, became one of the most influential land-use cases in the country, establishing a host of precedents that launched the field of environmental law. The dispute took more than eighteen years to resolve before the courts finally ruled to block the power plant. The whole episode taught me that activists had to be committed for the long haul, because important battles often took years to be resolved.

    To this day I wonder, how do we learn to speak up? How do we learn to find our voice and then to use that voice to open conversations, to raise questions, and, when necessary, to demand answers? We know that speech is fundamental to democracy,but why? Because the words we use, the reasons we offer, and the choices we make determine our future.
    Many forces in the world would prefer us to remain mute. Speech is subversive, whereas silence, as the great Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said, is acquiescence. If we do not speak up in the face of injustice, we give others the right to decide not only what happens but to whom. Through speech we bind ourselves to each other and to our destiny. In silence we drift in both time and space.
    To create community, to forge a bond in common, we must be able to communicate. When we understand one another’s ideas and emotions, when we see into each other’s lives, we span our differences and bring conscience and comfort to heal the brokenness of our world.
    Somehow I figured this out at a fairly early age—as a gift from my artistic parents, as an insight handed to me through my own experiences, as a blessing from life itself. With each passing year I discovered more deeply that humans have both the definite duty and the glorious opportunity to cross over the divisions that naturally seem to separate us. Yes, we are all born into different moments and places, but our very individuality carries within it the mysterious key to a shared humanity. We speak separate languages, but our restless attempts to translate our thoughts into words and our words into deeds cause us to discover new points of contact and pathways of expression.