- [Announcer] Live from your Public Media Studios.

WVIA presents Keystone Edition Arts.

A public affairs program that goes beyond the headlines to address issues in Northeastern & Central Pennsylvania.

This is Keystone Edition Arts.

And now, Erika Funke.

- Welcome to Keystone Edition Arts Where Environment & Creativity Meet, that's our title, as we meet the celebrated author of the "The Handmaid's Tale", Margaret Atwood, and hear her story of hope from her.

And learn about two hope-filled projects underway in our region from our guest artists, Patricia Johanson and Tannis Kowalchuk.

To open, Paul Lazar grounds the discussion for us.

(logo swooshing) (slow music) - [Paul] One of the legacies of coal mining is abandoned mine drainage or water that is polluted from contact with mining activity.

A series of chemical reactions occur when water and oxygen mix with minerals exposed during coal mining resulting in the water becoming acidic and the generation of iron oxide.

In Pennsylvania, nearly 5,500 miles of streams have been affected by abandoned mine drainage.

(water splashing) The Eastern Pennsylvania Coalition for Abandoned Mine Reclamation is a nonprofit organization that serves 16 counties in Northeastern and North Central Pennsylvania.

Executive director, Robert Hughes, shared that they do small collections of the iron oxide from rivers, then dry and process it for use as a wood stain and a glaze for ceramics.

Students in the Wuxbury area school district used the iron oxide to make tie-dye shirts last year, an activity that also incorporated a local environmental lesson.

For Keystone Edition Arts, I'm Paul Lazar.

(upbeat music) - Here's a question.

"In dark times, will there also be singing?

Yes, there will be singing about dark times."

Words from a poem by playwright, Bertolt Brecht.

We have three guests, who each is a singer of sorts, think of the bards.

Each one experiencing the realities of the world around her and using her creative talents to respond and reshape the way we see.

Perhaps echoing the call of W.S.

Merwin's "Blue Jays", "Flashing through the woods.

Change, change."

A distinguished poet, Merwin grew up in Scranton, won the Pulitzer Prize, and went on to establish a Conservancy in Hawaii to restore and preserve damaged lands and inspire innovation in the arts and sciences.

We welcomed the award-winning and celebrated author from Canada, Margaret Atwood, who has written 'The Handmaid's Tale" and over 50 volumes of fiction, nonfiction poetry and more.

Margaret Atwood was able to speak with us by Zoom before her visit to Wilkes University as part of the Allan Hamilton Dickson Fund Spring Writers Series.

Patricia Johanson is an internationally-known multidisciplinary artist, whose public projects bring together art, ecology, landscaping, and functional infrastructure, including Mary's Garden at Marywood University in Scranton.

She's actually been called a creative angel in these dark times.

And Tannis Kowalchuk, Founder & Artistic Director of the Farm Arts Collective in Damascus, Pennsylvania, an agricultural organization with a mission to engage and enhance rural community life through farming, performance, food and ecology.

She may even tell us about stilt walking.

There's no surprise for Margaret Atwood visiting Northeastern, Pennsylvania.

She already knows firsthand the impact of coal mining on people and places.

(logo swooshing) - There's a little town in Nova Scotia called Welshtown, and those were all immigrants from Wales.

And there was a lot of economic disparity as well.

It was poor people who did the mining.

It was rich people who made the profits.

So you wanna read the best mining story of all time, it's called Germinal.

And it is about a mining town in France in the 19th century.

Very gripping.

Mining was no joke, not a joke.

So Cape Breton in Canada is another coal mining area.

There's a lot of mining disaster stories as you know.

A lot of folk songs written about them, getting people out of minds that had collapsed, big stories trapped in the mine.

Wow.

A very dramatic and very claustrophobic.

But I'll give you a story of hope, which is the story of Sudbury Ontario, which I remember from a child, nothing grew there, like, nothing.

Zero, nothing, nada.

Because they were doing mining and they had done extreme logging earlier then they'd had a forest fire and then they were doing this mining which was covering the land with very acid residues and nothing would grow there.

And they realized, people would come there to work but they didn't wanna stay.

So they didn't really have a viable continuing community.

And we kind of loved it as a child 'cause it was like the moon.

It was (chuckles) wow, there's nothing here.

It's just rocks.

So Sudbury decided it was going to regrow itself.

It had to raise smoke stacks and put in buffers and things like that.

But also it had to replenish the soil.

And first, it planted things.

It stuffed limey soil into the cracks to counteract the acid.

And it planted tough grasses and blueberries, which can grow in that kinda condition.

And they replenished the soil and now they've got forests again.

They're slightly odd-looking forests.

They don't have everything that was there to begin with but there are forests.

And the big test was the water.

Because it was completely sterile.

And when they got the water back to being alive again, Jane Goodall came up and released a trout into it.

Sudbury, Ontario used to be a measure of pollution.

Like you would say, 'This is like five Sudburies."

And now it's a measure of regeneration.

So even if there has been a lot of pollution and destruction, it can be regrowm.

If you give nature the chance, balance at the conditions, nature will come back.

- Celebrated author, Margaret Atwood, creator, as we know of "Dystopian Fiction", who still has hope for the environment and our place in it.

Patricia Johanson is someone who no doubt thoroughly understands the scientific and ecological principles involved in a reclamation project like Sudbury Ontario.

And she has a poetic soul as Margaret Atwood does.

Patricia has worked internationally bringing all of her creative talents, designing public projects like Fair Park Lagoon in Dallas, Texas, considered one of the earliest ecological artworks of all.

She worked and had a long time friendship with painter par excellence of the land and natural forms, Georgia O'Keeffe.

And we're so fortunate to have her here with us to talk about a complex multi-layered project she's designed for Marywood University in Scranton.

Welcome, Patricia.

Please introduce us to Mary's Garden and that site that you have taken on and letting your imagination reclaim.

- Well, actually, the Marywood University's site is extraordinary.

It is the former site of the Marvine Colliery where coal was mined for 90 years.

And when the coal miners left, when the Colliery closed what was left were strip palms filled with toxic water, huge coal banks, which are the byproducts of coal.

Those are actually smaller dump piles within the woods.

And basically, there was very little living here.

The watershed had been disrupted and water no longer flowed on the site.

There had been a creek called Carter's Creek and it dropped down through the caverns and voids of the coal mining chambers.

There were seven levels of chambers under the Marywood site.

And when the nuns first bought that land, they used to see smoke rising from the land.

And one the roads that they just built, caught on fire and collapsed.

And so the residue of the mining era was always there and it was still there when I was asked to design this project.

But what interested me most was the mining history and I didn't want to erase it.

Normally, people who remediate nature, strip the land and create some ideal landscape.

I wanted to keep the coal mining history.

I wanted to honor the memory of the people who worked the site.

And the fact that it had been devastated, by the time I got there, and frankly, when Marywood bought the land, one of the things they loved was what they called Mary's Woods.

Well, of course the coal miners cut them all down and used them as mine crops.

And so what I wanted to do was bring nature back but also keep the coal mining history.

And so the project that I've designed is very much structured around the land forms that are still on the site and there are some enormous land forms.

And so basically, there are two projects.

One is called the Madonna Lily.

And these are both flowers that are reminiscent of the Blessed Virgin.

And if you look at the design, it's basically a storm water pond, but it has access like Fair Park Lagoon where students can go out on path silver water and they can do field research.

And the flowers, or just every flower, is basically something that removes pollutants from the soil.

So for example, that beautiful little iris.

Actually, if you think about an iris, it has a great big root bulb and it's the microbes living on that root bowl that actually eat the detritus and the pollutants.

And so I have made a study of plants and all of the plants there will remediate the land.

They will remove pollution and they will restore the watershed and there are a lot of them.

But they're all also relevant to the Blessed Virgin.

And so depending on how you wanna tell the story, you can have an environmental project, you can have a beautiful garden.

But it's not an ornamental garden, it's a working garden and it's something that will make the land better.

However, the land I have to say, I agree with Margaret Atwood.

Nature renews itself.

If you leave it alone, it comes back.

The problem is, when you do this kind of devastation there are things that won't come back because everything is connected.

And so for example, the trees, where the monarch butterflies over winter in Mexico are being cut down mercilessly.

They don't have enough money.

They don't have enough wardens monitoring the site.

And so people are doing illegal logging and cutting the trees down.

And so every year there are fewer and fewer monarchs.

The land will come back, the trees will regrow, but the butterflies may not.

Because you're depriving them of something that's so necessary to their being.

The trees keep them cool in the daytime.

They keep them warm at night and they cluster there for a reason and it's one of the few remaining sites.

The California monarchs are almost gone now.

There used to be two monarch migrations.

So this is just an example of when you do serious environmental damage.

Yes, the land will come back but often not everything that's on the land.

And so at Marywood, I do wanna restore not just the plants but also the wildlife.

I always think of that because animals are a key element in the whole web of life.

You can't just remove the ones you don't like which is what we tend to do.

We keep the ones and kill the ones that we find threatening.

And my work is exactly the opposite of that.

I think you have to put the whole system back and work in terms of systems, and work in terms of, you know, what the goals are.

And there are some, Marywood is just a wonderful site.

It's on the side of the mountain and the water comes downhill.

And as it traverses parking lots and roads picks up a lot of water pollution.

And all of this water now will go into the Madonna Lily and be purified before it's released into the ravine.

And then as far as the ravine goes, we need to restore the creek that used to flow there.

And so we're going to do that as well.

This is a little creek that goes to the lack of water river.

And once you restore these water bodies, the wildlife will come back.

Because a lot of the plants are not just stormwater plants but they're also habitat for wildlife.

- Patricia, when you give us that sense you have to have the ability to be, have the larger vision.

So that's the aesthetic vision of the Lily and how that all plays together and also the talent for understanding the plants and how they work and the super structure of the water remediation and so forth.

It's a scientific aesthetic balance.

And Tannis, we have you here.

And I think what's wonderful is you, Patricia, are changing the land but working with the land.

And Tannis, you work with the land in your art as well.

And you're both, you're both working with the transforming the land through your art in a positive way.

And Tannis, you are someone who doesn't just, aren't a dilettante.

You understand how to raise the vegetables and the fruits in a serious way.

How do you connect that with your art?

- Well, I am by nature a theater artist who found organic farming as a vocation.

And so my husband and I farm at Willow Wisp Organic Farm which is a 30-acre organic vegetable and flower farm in Damascus, Pennsylvania.

And not only are we stewarding the land and keeping it healthy and wanting to leave it even better than how we found it through all kinds of organic practices which include cover cropping and rotating crops, and always improving the soil and taking care of it.

And the water which we irrigate the Delaware River right beside us from which we irrigate.

You know, we wanna take care of that as well.

We're also making art.

And the art we're making is theater performances on the farm.

We are dedicating the next 10 years of our theater performance work to climate change and issues of climate change.

So we have this project called "Dream on the Farm" and it's a decalogue of performances about climate change.

We are entering year three of that decalogue and we are currently building our third original device theater performance with stilt walkers, with musicians, with people who farm.

Many of our ensemble members are actually farmers as well as performers.

And so some of the pieces you're seeing right now the pictures you're seeing are performances from last year's performance that took place at the farm and is currently on tour.

And it was a story of two scientists, Carl Sagan, and Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist.

Carl Sagan being the astronomer that many people know.

And they go on a journey to meet the microcosmic and the macrocosmic on the farm and learn from these microbes and the atmosphere and the hydrosphere what has been happening and trying to resolve it or at least find some solutions to present to the audience as a way of kind of fun way of learning about climate change, learning about systems, the macro and the micro on the farm and in the world.

- I think it's fascinating.

Patricia, you have said and we learn in a wonderful book, "Art and Survival" that you have realized that designs incorporating nature contribute to a restructuring of the world around people.

And you've said, the problem is to establish feelings of connectedness while setting the mind free to dream.

And I think you respond to that and you tell us in your theater work, connections and dreaming.

Just briefly, Patricia, how do you understand that people who pass through Mary's Garden would have a restructured relationship with the world around them and have that opening up that might help us?

- What I want them to see, and what Thomas said about Lynn Margulis is very true.

She proposed an alternate theory to Darwin's Law of Competition.

And basically, she believed, and nobody thought she was right at the time, but I believe as well, that the world is at base cooperative that is not competitive.

And you see that in nature.

And a good example is, for example, deep rooted trees, you will often see a giant, you know, mighty oak or something and there will be all these little plants growing at the base.

And the reason they're there is the trees will actually, at night release water into the soil and feed those little plants.

And so the big guy is harvesting water for the little guys.

This is the actual creek bed that you're showing where water no longer flows.

This is the site of the Madonna Lily and you can see how water could go there.

Those are the terraces that the Pennsylvania Bureau of Abandoned Mine Reclamation built.

And then at the bottom was the the wooded ravine, which is the last site.

They actually stripped, the Abandoned Mine Reclamation guys, actually stripped all the forest off the site, all the volunteer vegetation.

And so instead of holding the water on the site, it now runs off in those giant riprap channels that you saw on the photograph and goes in a covert under I-81.

And as an environmentalist, that's the last thing you want.

You want the water to seep into the ground.

You want it to be purified.

You want it to be available to wildlife.

You want it to be part of the whole network of water systems.

You don't wanna rent in the fabric.

And basically, that's what we have right now.

And so what I'm trying to do is restore the whole system.

Yes, it is art.

And yes, it is even sculpture because the sculpture is designed around the topography.

And the topography are the remnants of the coal mining process, the huge coal bags you know, which are mountainous.

And the dump piles and the strip ponds that you still see the depressions in the land.

So the residue, and of course on the site, there are also all the rusting mining vents and it's just a very, very interesting site.

And, you know, there are all these mines under it.

- Tannis, then that sense of connecting with the land and dreaming, because you use the term dream and dream for the future, or how do the folks who come to take part in your theater pieces.

How do they, in that make that connection and have that opportunity to dream?

Does that happen through theater always?

- Well, I think it does.

I mean, we're creating original theater performances around the notion of what is our future and how do we want to see the world.

Bringing theater to the farm, you're really encountering what could be lost, but also you're looking at a land that's being regenerated and that's producing.

And so that encounter with the beautiful land and then talking about what we could lose, what we're doing to the earth in the context of a beautiful piece of land that is thriving.

I feel is a really interesting way for audiences and the actors to experience climate change and have that conversation.

And through creative process and through witnessing a creative act, I feel like we can see problems and see issues, you know, really innovative way as both the doers and the viewers.

And that's my hope bringing theater to the farm.

I call it an agric-cultural act for both, the food growing and the productions that we're making, the artistic work we're making.

- Patricia, the book that is a wonderful compilation of your work that was written by Caffyn Kelley is titled "Art and Survival."

And you have a sense that art can, in the ways that you've been practicing your art can help us in the big picture to come to terms with what's happening around us in terms of the climate and the things that are so serious environmentally?

- Yes, and actually, I mean, I try to work on multiple levels.

One is just fix the problems.

So, very, very straightforward.

You see what's wrong and you try to rectify it but the other is try to convince other people.

So if we don't experience nature, or if the only experience of nature we have is in a park where they have ornamental plantings, you're not seeing how the system works and how important it is for every link in the chain that it's not there for any arbitrary reason it needs to be there.

And so I try to put back complete systems with public access where people can sit down and contemplate nature and see the plants and see the animals and see the seasons and understand how things work.

Not just landscape, a scenery.

When I grew up, landscapes were considered either gardens or scenery.

Mine is just the opposite.

I'm trying to bring back whole environments.

And I do it through infrastructure because those are very large projects.

They're multimillion dollar projects.

And a lot of people see them, a lot of people have access to them.

And so those are the only types of projects that I do now.

- Two minutes left only.

And one of the things that you've told me in the past, Tannis, is that humor is so important in your, in the work that you do in getting people to come along and have fun.

We had a chance to thank, we had a chance to thank Margaret Atwood at the end of our Zoom call.

And she said that, "Really, it still has to be fun.

It's not all crepe hanging and that it still has to be fun."

So we are just so pleased to have you here.

And we're so sorry that the time has passed by so quickly.

But we would refer all of our viewers to our website and to the Keystone Edition Section.

We thank you very much for all of the work that you do, Patricia, Tannis, and to Margaret.

And thank you for watching.

And remember, you can watch this episode or any previous episode on demand anytime online or on the WVIA app.

For Keystone Edition, I'm Erika Funke.

Thank you for watching.

And Tannis, bring us some fun, please.

Thank you for all you see and all you create for us.

- And thank you.

- And you have such wonderful humor in it all, through it all.

- Well, you only got one chance on the planet.

And if it's not fun, you know?

So I think I was with Gloria Steinem on the other night.

She's 88.

She's still continuing on.

And she said, "It has to be fun."

(theatrical music)