Silent Sounds There are sounds in this world Other than the beating of Tin hearts to the time of Gold pieces dropping in Silver cashboxes. Sounds other than the Fanatical ravings of Self-inflated, Antlike, little men Waving feeble antenna And trying to explain away The World. And these—the Sounds of Life— Are the ones that bear listening: Cicadas wailing in rustling sun, And trout breaking crystal water In its dying light.
Cut off by insulated offices, Crowded laboratories, Classrooms and white collars, These sounds— Independent of civilization— Are the true foundations Of our future. Despite us and all we uncover, They and this world will go on.
Voices from the beginning of Time may pass over our Machine-deafened ears, But when these soft sounds stop, We will stop, too.
When the lowly insect ceases Its song, The Great Chain of Being ceases Its cycle.
And when earth dies...
We die with it.
I wrote that poem in January 1959, about midway through my journalism studies in Chapel Hill. It appeared as today’s nc poem in the News & Observer, and of all the poems, articles and letters I wrote, this was my parents’ favorite. My father liked it because of what it said. My mother, because she felt it made my father think of other things besides work.
I liked it because it reflected my understanding of the significance and the beauty of nature, for which I always found time. It contrasted the self-importance of man to the hidden machinery of nature that keeps this old world going, and puts a little depth into the admonition: “Take time to smell the roses.”
My mother felt it put me squarely in the environmental category. She sent a copy of it to me recently with the note, “Think about it.” Where it actually puts me is in a place where I feel I have a pretty thorough understanding of the environment, from bacteria that break down matter to the earthquakes and tornados that destroy the land, the storms, hurricanes and tsunamis that devastate our shorelines, and all the roles that nature plays in between. I know more than most about the nature of nature, and feel I have a rational understanding of the environment. I’m not an advocate of scaring the hell out of people with hypothetical, self-serving claims in order to take their money or secure political gain by arguing that the balance of nature and the natural order of things (including human nature) should be, or can be meaningfully changed. I am not a radical environmental activist like the “Angry Young Man” in Billy Joel’s song, “with his fist in the air and his head in the sand.”
I believe in evolution and adaptation because the wisdom behind creation has made provision for it. And I have always been an optimist, as my father was before me. As his friend Paul Harvey said, “I have never seen a monument erected to a pessimist.” While writing this book I came across a provocative thought from the New Yorker that “there are many species for the same reason there are many sentences. You might know only a few thousand words, but you have no trouble or prospects of running out of sentences.” The environmental directive for life is simple: to reproduce its species, through spores, bulbs, seeds, rhizomes, binary fission, mitosis, division, fragmentation, budding, eggs, or live birth. For humans, birth creates families. Blood is thicker than water. Isn’t it? Families can have their wars and fights and squabbles but still recover over time if there is balance. But balance can be tipped by nonfamily enablers who alter the normal ebb and flow of family relationships and lead to its dissolution.
I know. My father caused me some anguish and pain for many years, but he kept us together and my family still loved him in the end. When all was said and done, there was healing and enduring respect for his legacy.
My father’s legacy is not one to be forgotten, and what he worked for all his life should not to be ignored or refuted. I was sensitive to erosion of his hardworking lifetime ideals, and despite the absence of his intentions for the foundation’s mission in his will, the philanthropic objectives that best reflected the interests of my side of the family were evident in the previous thirty-year history of its grant making, when my father, mother, and Johnnie sat on the board. As far as my family was concerned, no one was going to trample on his grave.
For three decades the Park Foundation made grants in support of education, religion and human services. Having researched the entirety of my father’s relationships and interests during his lifetime, I felt I knew where his interests were and where they weren’t.
I have no objections to environmental grants as long as they are defined and directed to realistic and obtainable goals. While I was a trustee of the Park Foundation, my trustee-initiated grants to environmental causes were the largest of any trustee and the percentage of my environmental funding was larger than that of the Park Foundation as a whole. But they were not directed to some of the environmental groups Michael Crichton makes reference to in his 2004 book State of Fear.
What I objected to was an increasing use of general board-initiated funds directed to environmental activism crowding out other grant categories. Nor did I have problems with public broadcasting programming such as Nature and Nova, if it did not expand to the point that it wiped out the foundation’s ability to issue grants to other educational, charitable, faith-based and community human service programs. But our foundation’s grants were beginning to be based on barely concealed political activism, pessimism, criticism, radical environmentalism and other anti-isms. When grants for programming to which the Park Foundation’s logo would be linked were controversial, including criticism of specific organizations or corporations, or politically partisan, I had real concerns.
A conflict had already arisen with another family member when my mother named me first vice president. Shortly after this I became aware of discussions behind my back objecting to what was believed to be my “heir apparent” status. My mother resisted complaints at that time, saying it was “Roy’s turn,” and refused to believe another family member was complaining, even though it was common knowledge to the rest of the trustees. My children and I felt the Park Foundation was beginning to move in directions I felt were very different from those my father would have approved of or taken, and I knew our attempts to hold to his legacy were putting a strain on my mother.
I remember in one of our board meetings, I was sitting next to my mother, and while other family members were proposing some unusual environmental grants, my mother shook her head and whispered to me, “If your father were here, he wouldn’t believe this.” The attorney trustee, who worked for years for my father, overheard the comment and said, “If Roy had attended any one of these meetings, the Board of Trustees would have been a committee of one.”
To try to gain some balance, my mother requested the addition of two more trustees to the foundation: Senator Harry Byrd and John McNair III, a former CEO of Wachovia Bank, both of them having been lifelong directors of my father’s companies. These appointments did not have a noticeable effect, since they were not full trustees.
The meetings were run by the book, but differences continued to exist beneath the surface. It was heartbreaking for me and my family to watch how the majority of what my father worked so hard to make was directed to grants funding directions I felt were not in accordance with what he believed. In a joint attempt to calm the situation an outside advisor who professionally consulted family foundations (he was also in charge of one of his own) was engaged in early 2000 for a two-day session in New York. By the time it was all over, a family member summarized the progress of the meeting by declaring it “a waste of time.” By then it was too late to hope for a family reconciliation, although both Senator Byrd and John McNair tried to talk my mother out of the family split.
Without input from me or my children, it was decided that the solution to pursuing the philanthropic objectives best reflecting the diverse interests of the trustees, was to separate the trustees who followed the conservative philosophy my father held during his lifetime and who were trying to keep the foundation within the bounds of what we felt had been his “donor intent.”
I had invited all of the trustees over to my home for dinner the night before the meeting where the decision was to take place, and while they enjoyed my hospitality, one of them told me that my mother would not change her mind.