Undercurrents

7The Undercurrents Ripple and ConvergePractical Activists Navigating New Waters

Few will have the greatness to bend history itself, but each of us can work to change a small portion of events. It is from numberless diverse acts of courage and belief that human history is shaped. Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.

—Robert F. Kennedy

WHEN I WAS A long‐haired teenager working the hayfields, I wrote my first book, Footsteps in the Mud, with my cousin Holly. It was a spoof on our lives as high school student‐irrigators in small‐town Montana, circa 1970. While touched with an embarrassing dose of adolescent martyrdom, a quick re‐read today reveals that we did understand some profound things about water: its force, flow, and fickle nature that can make the difference between abundance and scarcity. Most of all, we recognized the way water spreads, how it moves outward from distant mountain snow packs, trickling into steams that become rushing creeks that lead to surging rivers, shaping life wherever it passes en route to the place where all these fingers converge. The job of an irrigator, we wrote, was to use nature's currents in ways that would nourish the fields while conserving as much water ...