John Denver, president and co-founder of the Windstar Foundation and a member of Earth Island's Advisory Board, died last October when his plane plunged into the waters of the Pacific Ocean.
"John was deeply concerned about children's separation from the living world," said Windstar Foundation Chair Cheryl Charles, "He wanted people to have the experience of feeling the rush of wild waters, hearing the sound of a loon, watching the wonder of a night sky aglow with starlight on a crisp winter's night. He loved it all."
John founded the Windstar Foundation to promote "a peaceful and sustainable environment." Last year, Windstar's 1000 acres of Colorado high country were placed in a land conservancy that will protect forever the wildlands and a critical elk migration corridor.
John's friends at Windstar have asked simply that well-wishers continue to love and defend the Earth, to support groups that John founded and supported - Windstar, Plant-It 2000, The Hunger Project - as well as other worthy organizations and always to act "on behalf of children, the environment and peace for all."
The following words are John Denver's, drawn from his 1994 autobiography, Take Me Home:
With the building of the pipeline… in 1979, [I saw Alaska] being drawn into a vortex of development. Up until then, I really hadn't thought of myself as an environmentalist, though I recognized the need to stand up to the developers and protect the wilderness from shortsighted exploitation.
We needed wilderness more than wilderness needed us. In other words, there was more to gain from not exploiting this precious resource than from doing so. The stream of experiences that had taken me to the Rockies and allowed me to begin to know and understand myself was starting to move me to higher ground….
Even before I thought of the sun as energy, I connected to it pragmatically: the sun as the source of life on this planet. "Sunshine on My Shoulders" was about this, not about pastoral escapism. The sun gives its light and energy to everyone without judgment. And the wind passes over us all through this thin layer of atmosphere that we live in all together….
In 1976, I bought a thousand acres of land in Snowmass, Colorado, for Windstar…. We were going to construct a complex of high-tech buildings where we'd have conferences and year-round workshops. People would come to learn about the environment so that they could take what they learned back out into the world….
During this time, my own urgent moral consciousness about Planet Earth found voice, too. In it, mixed into my own thought, I could hear Buckminster Fuller's moral vocabulary and Jacques Cousteau's, David Brower's and Amory Lovins' and that of a dozen others who are real stewards of the Earth.
My performance tours thereafter were conceived… as an ongoing effort to celebrate the Earth as home…. Where I was already deeply committed, I grew even more deeply so. There was nothing I could take for granted anymore about the processes of renewal as they affect life on the planet….
Faith is a kind of knowing: it is different from hope. My faith is that life is purposeful: of that I'm sure. There is a god, there is intelligence, there is consciousness. And behind all of this, there is incredible
compassion. Life didn't just happen. Relationships don't just happen. We're not an accident in the midst of a lifeless universe….
Although I'm no less distressed about the Earth's needs than when I was younger, I see more clearly now what I can do about it, and I see that it needs doing as I live my life, daily, reverently.
The more thoughtful industrial societies, if one can characterize any as such, are beginning to see environmental issues from a global perspective, and that's to the good.
When we have grown blind to wholeness and can no longer see every process as a balanced cycle, when we can't remember a clear dream of the future, we resort to expediency. Through fear we have changed the surface of the Earth.
More of us are coming to see that you can't love yourself without loving the Earth. You can't be in a relationship with another unless you are in a relationship with your Mother. When you poison the ocean, and you poison a cloud, and you poison the rain, and you poison the cells in your body, you poison your womb and you poison the child who was carried there.
It's to increase the awareness of these problems that I've worked and that I still work, while I try to live my life, difficult as both sometimes seem….
It still gives me my deepest pleasure to know that songs I've written reach out and touch people all over the world, about whose lives I know little but care about very much….
Yesterday I had a dream about dying
About laying to rest and then flying
How the moment at hand
Is the only thing we really own
And I lay in my bed and I wonder
After all has been said and is done for
Why is it thus we are here
And so soon we are gone…
…Though the singer is silent
There still is the truth of the song.
- "On the Wings of a Dream," by John Denver
Excerpted from Take Me Home: An Autobiography © 1994 by John Denver Reprinted by permissiion of Harmony Books, a division of Crown Publishers, Inc. New York, 1994). Our thanks to Nancy Azzam, John Denver's chief advocate for whales and dolphins since 1981, for her kind assistance in preparing this tribute. Stay in touch: contact Windstar at 2317 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass, CO 81654, (970) 927-4777, www.wstar.org.
John Denver - A Poet for the Planet