By Jeffery Beam

The Botany Library, where I work, sits across the street from what was once three of the most delightful sites on Carolina’s campus — a stately 80-foot Catalpa tree (recently saved from destruction) that in May makes Kenan Chemistry Towers seem the perfect foil for its flowering; Coker Woods (now much diminished), which nurtures Chapel Hill’s old “meeting of the waters” and represents some of the last remnant forest in which John Couch once collected mushrooms; and a lovely outdoor staircase (ah, the Spanish steps in Rome!) topped by an allée of massive bald cypresses, Taxodium distichum. The cypresses are gone now, as are the steps, and their loss was heartrending.

For almost 30 years I have called Carolina home. As a result of the current unprecedented development on campus, I feel that my home has become a bird’s nest of blue eggs attacked by a snake or an owl. I sense that expansion has taken precedent, not equal footing, over Carolina’s natural beauty.

What to do? Do you know Dr. Seuss’s story of the Lorax? It’s a story of obsessive “biggering and biggering” — forest destruction and building and the resulting pollution and death that came of it. A vice chancellor bestowed the title of campus Lorax on me as a result of my speaking “for the trees.” As the Lorax said, “The trees have no tongues.” My hue and cry seeking like-minded individuals resulted in the formation of the Chancellor’s Task Force on Landscape Heritage and Plant Diversity.

This year I also formed the Save West House Coalition in hopes of rescuing that diminutively charming and historic building from demolition. I had walked uncounted times past West House without ever going inside or knowing anything of its history.

I’m no Luddite — I appreciate progress and expansion when measured and balanced. I had ignored the process of the Arts Commons development, which was leading to the building’s demolition, for I loved the idea of the commons and assumed, mistakenly, that the designers held the same values as I and others, could see the obvious usefulness of West House in the Commons, and knew its significance.

Fortunately our coalition has been successful in the first stages of saving the house without threatening the commons. Now we will have to raise a lot of private money to move it.

It still galls me that it has come to this, but at least the coalition made its point and the house may yet survive. As a result, the Preservation Society of Chapel Hill gave me an award this year. The best part of the award was that I was sited as Chapel Hill’s “Horton” — another Dr. Seuss character who saves a whole civilization on a speck of dust because “A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

Why would a poet, a singer, a performer, a librarian, an hourly employee at that, put forth such efforts? The complex answer requires the aid of other poets who have taught me to respect the natural world and the wonder of beautifully made things.

Mother Ann Lee, of the Shakers, once said, “Go home, and take good care of what you have. Provide places for your things, so that you may know where to find them at any time, by day or night. Maybe we have only yesterday’s street or a ring of trees on a hill … left us.”

America adores expansion. It’s part of our karma. We owe great and sundry achievements to this drive. However, it’s become a disease that is destroying our international reputation, our social fabric, our freedoms and is ultimately detrimental to our material existence. Short-term gains for lasting ills. I’m shocked to realize it has infiltrated our universities, traditionally home to less aggressive values.

The poet Russell Edson says, “The things we took for granted do not take us so.” This applies to trees, as well as cultures, religions as well as oceans, institutions as well as friends. We blindly think progress is always bigger, better is always more. Mies van der Rohe argues, “Less is more.” Poet Peyton Houston reiterates, “The storm in the heart of a flower is also the hurricane of God’s whisper.”

I have trained myself as a poet to look at places we don’t usually look. The poet Rilke made evident, “We are slowly losing the honey of the visible.” I believed it when poet Miguel Hernandez said, “The lemon tree in my garden is a bigger influence on my work than all the poets together.” And when Emily Dickinson observed, “There’s a noiseless noise in the Orchard — that I let persons hear.” I prefer to look at the “under / side of things, the side / shaded / by moss, the coolness under / the walkway / stone.” I have found beauty and value in the “The last place we would think / to look / … in the discarded / shattered world.”

When as a young poet I read William Blake’s great law, “Nations are destroyed or flourish in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish,” I took my job seriously. For 30 years I’ve understood my role as writing and performing poetry and music. Now, observing our society act out its greed and destructiveness domestically and internationally, I understand that my role is larger than that. I am Emerson’s poet, standing “among partial men for the complete man” apprising “us not of his wealth, but of the common wealth.”

I cannot rest while we lose the honey of the visible — the signature landscape that makes Carolina’s campus unlike any other. I cannot watch a building with a varied, important and unique history be destroyed. Nowadays, beauty, scarce in our culture, and its guidebook, aesthetics, remain virtually untaught under the thrust of invention-increase and must be guarded like a flame. Otherwise both will go out, and much good with it. As a poet, and as a spiritual being, I know that beauty, ethics, and morality are inseparable. What little we learn from the past if we desire the new at the expense of the valuable old!

In November I visited the 13th-century town of Erice, Sicily. It has seemingly remained untouched since the 1400s on its narrow peak overlooking the Mediterranean. Each cobbled street displays a different pattern. The buildings, maintained in ancient quaintness and stony silence, seem locked in time. The landscape is well tended, and beautiful.

But Erice is host to one of the most prestigious scientific retreats in the world. Many of the buildings harbor inside them state-of–the-art laboratories, think tanks, and conference rooms furnished with contemporary Italian design — always the best, always refined, exciting and adventurous. Behind those massive wooden doors, through which children of the Renaissance moved, move today’s Renaissance women and men.

We should take some lessons from the Italians. No, they aren’t the richest or most powerful country in the world when it comes to material possessions, but oh, they are far richer than we, and they know it.

Jeffery Beam is the assistant to the biology librarian of the Botany Section at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is the author of 16 works of poetry. He can be reached at jeffbeam@email.unc.edu.