What is natural? Pumping water from a mine is not a natural act, I believe, but neither is raising a “large dam” across Meadow Brook to create a pond. From the pond, the Sandersons also built a fairly elaborate “water-works” that included two hydraulic rams, one “for the purpose of raising water from a lower to a higher level,” in this case from the pond to a storage tank in the house’s attic, the second to force “water upon the lawn for the purposes of irrigation there, and for the purpose of supplying a fountain.”49 Drinking directly from Meadow Brook is a natural act, I suppose, but I enjoy drinking water piped into my house as much as I like electric lights and a heated home. At what point do my accumulating preferences undermine their sources? When does my land use rob others of their use?
The Pennsylvania Supreme Court had to choose between coal and clean water. They chose coal. In a 5–2 decision, the justices ruled that the Sandersons suffered a “mere personal inconvenience,” which “must yield to the necessities of a great public industry, which although in the hands of a private corporation, subserves a great public interest.” Scranton, after all, had prospered solely because of coal. And this was a mining region, the judges reminded everyone; the Sandersons simply should have known that mines poison “mountain streams.” Pointing out that the couple has benefited from the wealth mining has created, Justice J. J. Clark found “no great hardship, nor any violence to equity, in their also accepting the inconvenience necessarily resulting from the business.”50
The court also agreed with the company that mining is a natural operation with natural consequences. Polluting—destroying—Meadow Brook was simply one result of a natural process, mining. Writing for the majority, Justice Clark asserted that “the defendants introduced nothing into the water, to corrupt it; the water flowed into Meadow Brook just as it was found in the mine; its impurities were from natural and not from artificial causes.” It didn’t matter that the company pumped the water to the surface or that sulfuric acid killed the stream. Clark simply noted that a miner “may upon his own lands, lead the water which percolates into his mine, into the streams which form the natural drainage of the basin, in which the coal is situate, although the quantity as well as the quality of the water in the stream may thereby be affected.”51 This reasoning gave coal companies a green light to mine with abandon.
A closely watched case at the time, Pennsylvania Coal Company v. Sanderson has come to symbolize how nineteenth-century courts struggled to meet legal challenges created by the rise of new industries and technologies. Had the decision gone the other way, coal companies may have faced scores of lawsuits based on the effects of their mining operations, but with its ruling in favor of Pennsylvania Coal, the case signaled that the law was moving from protecting individual property rights to protecting corporate property rights. The Sanderson case marks the culmination of a movement in property law from an agrarian to an industrial point of view; after Pennsylvania Coal, “property law was no longer about the right to remain undisturbed in one’s lawful use; it was now chiefly about the right to use land for maximum gain.”52
The dispute wasn’t a big guy/little guy battle. The Sandersons were well known and well connected; they and their neighbors were not innocents swallowed by urban and industrial life. An 1877 map of our neighborhood shows that J. Gardner and his father, the original developer of our Green Ridge suburb, occupied stately homes on three-quarters of a city block on Seventh Street, which was soon after christened Sanderson Avenue. Depicting the pond that the Sandersons created to trap Meadow Brook water, the map shows the stream as a thin, nervous line lost among the Sandersons’ ruled and numbered lots, which wait for buyers and builders; after leaving the pond, the brook passed under four rail lines, crossed two city blocks, and skirted the Centennial breaker before escaping into the Lackawanna River.53
George Sanderson, Sr., C. Dupont Breck, and Elisha Phinney laid those gridlines and actively promoted coal and railroad interests. Sanderson, a Pennsylvania Senate colleague of George Scranton, “with whom he co-operated in securing needed legislation,” founded the city’s first bank, made a pile of money in downtown real estate, and built a railroad to his suburb.54 Breck represented the Duponts in the local manufacture of mine explosives, and Phinney ran flour and feed operations that supplied “food to the industrial city’s expanding population.”55 Powerful men connected to powerful people, these guys understood land as money, not life. Like the rest of us, they were both creators and destroyers.
I confront this fact about myself in Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony, a novel whose lessons about land use I’m still learning. The story depicts a Native American farmer coping with an acute awareness of the world’s suffering, vividly symbolized by the first atomic explosions, which a local uranium mine fueled. Tracing his healing process, the novel follows Tayo, a traumatized World War II veteran, as he gropes toward wholeness through remembering his and the Laguna Pueblos’ stories, patterns at whose heart rests human oneness with the land. As he recovers, Tayo learns that his life tells one part of a single, communal, human-and-land story, one that others want erased. To remember, to put story and place back together, Tayo must relearn to pay attention to the land, its flora and fauna, its rocks and waters.
Tayo’s troubles—and his healing—have much to do with water. Early on in the narrative, he flashes back to the scene of his psychic wounding, the Bataan Death March: as he and a corporal struggle to carry the former’s wounded cousin Rocky, an effort that an incessant storm makes more difficult, Tayo damns “the rain until the words were a chant... he could hear his own voice praying against the rain” (12). If Rocky dies, Tayo thinks, “it would be the rain and the green all around that killed him” (11). To save Rocky, he “made a story for all of them, a story to give them strength,” its words like “pebbles and stone extending to hold the corporal up” (12). But the words fail: the corporal falls, Rocky slips from their grasp, and a Japanese soldier clubs the wounded man to death.
When he returns to his Laguna Pueblo home, Tayo believes that his curse has caused a long drought, although similar droughts had afflicted the area after World War I and in the Roaring Twenties (10). Droughts happen, Uncle Josiah had taught a young Tayo, “when people forget, when people misbehave” (46). His stories teach the boy that if people forget that the land is “where we come from... This sand, this stone, these trees, the vines, all the wildflowers,” the earth—the “mother of the people”—will get “angry at them for the way they [are] behaving. For all she care[s], they could go to hell—starve to death” (45, 101). Warning Tayo against killing another fly, Josiah tells him, “Next time, just remember the story,” the story of the “green-bottle fly who went to her, asking forgiveness for the people” (101, 102).
Trading war stories, the adult Tayo and his veteran friends substitute Coors beer for the waters of home. Realizing they had just served as pawns in another’s story, in “defending the land they had already lost,” they get drunk because beer is “soothing... The sky, the land were distant then”; the past lost “its impact and seemed like a vague dream” (169, 241; see 159). Just as they had accepted U.S. Army appeals to patriotism, they accept the image of purity that Coors peddles: to assure customers that its beer is brewed with “pure Rocky Mountain spring water,” the company labels bottles with an outsized—fake—spring (55). To feel whole again, Tayo must first vomit beer, sweeping from his insides the lie on the Coors bottle, and with it the ritual of telling war stories, which had crowded from his mind the life lessons in Josiah’s stories (168, 200, 250).56
Instead of beer, Tayo must drink the waters of home, which heal. On the way to a bar, he and his friend Harley stop beside a spring that flows “even in the driest years” (45). Kneeling at the water’s edge and closing his eyes, Tayo “tasted the deep heartrock of the earth, where the water came from, and he thought maybe this wasn’t the end after all” (46). Even within times