JANET KEATING AND I climbed to the top of a mountain in West Virginia, through oak and hickory, hemlock, pines and tulip poplar, basswoods, maple and locust—one of the most biodiverse forests in the world—or what is left of it. We stood for a moment looking up at four or five bat houses, which had been mounted by a coal company.
Our eyes moved from the little wood boxes to the decapitated landscape below us, the evidence of mountaintop removal, the vanishing of much of the state’s horizon.
Keating, a former public school teacher, is executive director of the Ohio Valley Environmental Coalition, a group that waged a successful region-wide fight to keep what would have been the largest chlorine-based pulp mill in the United States out of West Virginia. She has been fighting mountaintop removal for years. Until you’ve seen the impact of this type of mining for yourself, it’s hard to clearly imagine the magnitude of the devastation. What was once an adjacent mountain is simply gone; what the great machines did to this mountain can only be compared to glaciation’s advances and withdrawals. Not only are the rock and earth gone forever, but the understory, the original home of those bats, is scraped away. Some one hundred acres of approximately 80 different tree species, including dogwood and red-bud and spicebush; 710 species of flowering plants; 42 species of ferns; 138 species of grasses and sedges are all gone, along with a thousand vertical feet of mountaintop. All of this is shoved into valley fills. Slurry, liquid waste from the coal-washing process, is stored in impoundments. Especially when built at the headwaters of a watershed, this waste can seep or spill into the lower valleys and hollows, choking stream life and flooding human settlements with carcinogenic chemicals, including arsenic and mercury. When one impoundment failed, in 2000, it released 306 million gallons—more than the number of gallons spilled in the Gulf disaster—buried the land under as much as ten feet of sludge, and killed all life in seventy-five miles of waterways. Another sludge slurry pond dam that broke in 1972 killed 125 people, injured 1,100, and left 4,000 homeless. The company referred to the event as “an act of God.”
The Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act of 1977 requires coal companies to “reclaim” the land by replacing topsoil (under waivers, the companies may use “topsoil substitutes”). Coal-mining outfits might argue that this method of extraction is the only cost-effective way to extract seams of coal not available through traditional mining methods. And they might remind us that we are an energy-hungry nation. On this last point, they would certainly be right.
As Keating and I looked down at the crater (the massive destruction, mostly hidden from public view by the forests around it, is difficult to assess unless one has looked at it from above), I wondered if such a place could ever be restored. She shook her head. “What we’re looking at down there will be hydroseeded, which means they’ll just spray it with grass seed, usually non-native, and some kind of chemical that helps the grass grow,” she said. The scene below us reminded me of the disappearing horizon in my own city, where mammoth graders cut and fill the hills for development.
But what about those ads that the coal companies run describing their restoration projects? “They show their little showcase places, or they say, ‘Isn’t it wonderful? Now we have flat land available for development—for houses,’” Keating said. “Sometimes they reclaim it for fish and wildlife habitat. The aquatic system in the Appalachian region had some of the highest richness and endemic populations of mussels and fish. There’s no way that it’s going to come back, because they’ve changed the soil chemistry, they’ve changed the light regime. Nothing is going to be the same.”
If money were no object, would it be possible to restore or reclaim the land that has been destroyed by mountaintop removal, truly reclaim it? “Not in our lifetime. One reason is we don’t even know what we’ve lost. In southern West Virginia, where most of this is taking place, the state never fully inventoried the natural world. I think part of the reason was, as long as we don’t know what we’re destroying, it’s free.”
In addition to direct affronts to the natural world and human health, cultural memory is torn and lost. “All of our mountains have names,” Keating said. “Or had them. And the creeks all have names, and people know, or knew, these places. They had names. People would go into these woods and hunt ginseng, and they would use the money from selling ginseng to buy their family’s Christmas presents. They would use the herbs here, the goldenseal, the bloodroot, for medicines—now gone.”
These mountains offer a warning. Nature restoration—even human/ nature restoration—can be used as a cover for more destruction. As businesses become more productive and inventive through a deeper understanding of nature and its patterns, the need for a restorative business ethic will grow.
Paul Hawken, the author and entrepreneur, writes: “Business must change its perspective and its propaganda, which has successfully portrayed the idea of ‘limits’ as a pejorative concept. Limits and prosperity are intimately linked. Respecting limits means respecting the fact that the world and its minutiae are diverse beyond our comprehension and highly organized for their own ends, and that all facets connect in ways which are sometimes obvious, and at other times mysterious and complex.”1 Or, as John Muir put it: “When you tug on a string in Nature, you find it is connected to everything else.” Nature’s limits are akin to what a “blank canvas was to Cezanne or a flute to Jean-Pierre Rampal,” writes Hawken. “It is precisely in the discipline imposed by the limitations of nature that we discover and imagine our lives.”2
Despair is tempting, and the reasons for it may yet triumph over those for optimism. But models for a new business ethic are emerging everywhere, along with opportunities for a new sense of purpose within the business world, and, for individuals, the potential for new identity.
Traditionally, agriculture has created many, if not most, of the jobs related to the human connection to nature. A new movement in that arena, one that includes but goes beyond organic crops, could not only change the nature of cities, but could revive the family farm and the small towns that once served them. In this sector, a restorative business ethic is coming into focus.
One afternoon, I rode from Denver to Boulder with Page Lambert, one of the best writers of the West. She looked out at the “oil slick,” as she put it, of housing developments spreading across the plains. “People move here for the ambience, but because they don’t fully understand the ranching culture, they end up stopping the beauty that drew them,” she said. As we drove, Lambert described her relationship with cattle—the fifty cows that her family tended when they lived in Wyoming.
Her memoir, In Search of Kinship, records the experiences of living off that land. She also keeps a diary and recently sent me passages from it, describing the sensory wonder of the small family ranch: wading through waist-high snow, drifts ten feet deep in the draws, to feed the livestock; finding a coyote’s den in a drift, mountain lion tracks up the canyon, a horse frozen solid in winter. She wonders what happens to a culture when it loses knowledge of such connections. Lambert and others struggle “in vain against the anti-ranching politics of the day, against those who blame small family farms and ranches for the bad conservation ethics of corporate agriculture,” she says. And she fears that many well-intentioned people still do not understand “the role of hoofed animals on the western grasslands, and the role of rural culture in the nation’s consciousness.” In her diary, she writes, “I fly to California and spend five days beside my dying father. I stroke his body, speak softly to him, hold his hands.” She phones home and speaks to her family. Her children “are in the basement with a hypothermic newborn calf, birthed during a blizzard. She tells of how they “massage the calf’s body, use hot water bottles and an electric blanket to warm him, speak softly to him. He dies within moments of my father, at high noon on the spring equinox.” In that moment, despite her sorrow, she is grateful that her children “view death, not impersonally as filtered through the media, but as a vital part of their own lives.” As we drive, she considers the snow that still drifts across the land, and the lives that follow.
Lambert and other ranchers and farmers who value and hope to extend their heritage have a friend in Courtney White, cofounder and executive director of the Quivira Coalition, a nonprofit conservation organization, based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, dedicated to the concept of land and health, and to building bridges between ranchers, environmentalists, scientists, public land managers, and others. The organization had adopted this Wendell Berry quote as its unofficial motto: “You can’t save the land apart from the people, to save either you must save both.” One of the coalition’s goals is to spread the concept of the New Ranch. Elements include progressive ranch management, scientifically guided riparian and upland restoration, local food production, land health assessment, and monitoring.
I first met the lanky, friendly White at a Quivira Coalition conference in Albuquerque. Many of the five hundred or so people in the room wore cowboy hats, and most of the rest looked like REI shoppers just back from a wilderness hike. A decade ago, White, an ex–Sierra Club activist and former archaeologist, decided that environmentalism-as-we-know-it was fading and would soon be replaced by something he calls the “new agrarianism.” “I wanted to push back a bit against a major paradigm of the environmental movement, of which I was a member at the time, which said that nature and people (their work, specifically) needed to be kept as far apart as possible . . . that environmental problems could be solved with environmental solutions largely devoid of culture or economics,” he wrote. “According to this line of thinking the natural world could be ‘saved’ apart from an effort to ‘save’ ourselves.”3 By contrast, he defines the new agrarianism as “an ecological economy centered on food and land health which builds resilience, encourages ethical relationships, and celebrates life.” He points to the growing interest in local, family-scale sustainable food, fiber, and fuel production—in, near, and beyond cities. The surge, which began in the 1980s, is “collaborative watershed groups focused on restoring health to riparian areas, it’s the innovative use of livestock to combat noxious weed infestations, it’s the carbon-sequestering practices of good land stewardship, and much more.”
Environmentalists are right when they criticize certain farming and ranching techniques. But re-natured ranching and farming practices are cultivating renewed ethical ground. For example, consider David and Kay James, who, with their kids, raise grass-fed beef (rather than cattle fattened on corn and agricultural by-products in a feedlot) on 220,000 acres of public land across parts of Colorado and New Mexico. During the agriculture depression of the 1970 s, the ranch fell on hard times, but the James’s adopted a complex grazing program, diversified into other organic businesses, and the ranch returned to life. Not only that, but four of the five James offspring came back to the ranch, and brought sustainable businesses with them—this, in an era when young people are often tempted to flee farming regions. The James family described to White the land and community standards they hope will create a new rural America: lands covered with biologically diverse vegetation; lands tuned to functioning water, mineral, and solar cycles; lands with abundant and diverse wildlife; a community benefiting from locally grown, healthy food; and a people aware of the importance of agriculture to the environment.4
Anthony Flaccavento, former executive director of the nonprofit Appalachian Sustainable Development (ASD), is another pioneer in vanguard agriculture. In the late 1990 s, when tobacco farming went into a rapid decline, many small-scale growers, feeling under siege from health advocates, shrinking markets, and environmentalists, were ready to quit farming, even though their families had known no other life for generations. In 2000, recognizing the plight of these tobacco farmers and the simultaneous gap in the region’s organic-produce supplies, ASD launched Appalachian Harvest, a co-op program for new and experienced organic farmers. Co-op participants now sell their fresh, organic produce wholesale to major retail markets. “When people hear that tobacco farmers—the ‘enemies’ of health and environment—are switching to organic produce (and now livestock), they are amazed,” he says. The co-op keeps local dollars at home by involving local people in the production, marketing, and consumption of goods.
“For many church and social-justice activists, the credo was, ‘Think your way to a new way of living,’” he adds. “Over time, my philosophy evolved from there into ‘Live your way to a new way of thinking.’” Immersion in the culture he serves, and in the nature that serves the culture, is the foundation of his activism. As part of his immersion philosophy, Flaccavento operates his own seven-acre, certified-organic farm. “Because I farm, too, if there’s a generally bad year, my farm gets hit just like the others.” Flaccavento recently founded SCALE Inc. (Sequestering Carbon Accelerating Local Economies) and allows public visits to his land to help promote his vision of ecologically sound farming practices.
Other examples of vanguard agriculture scarcely resemble mainstream farming. Teal Farm, in the foothills of Vermont’s Green Mountain National Forest, offers one glimpse. The farm includes some 540 acres of northern hardwood watershed with streams and pastures. A farmhouse and barn boast a renewable energy system, and eight acres of orchard “in sculpted micro-climates around the buildings.” In the online journal, Reality Sandwich, Anya Kamenetz describes the farm as “looking less like the monoculture fields of traditional agriculture and more like an enhanced wilderness.”5
Meanwhile, in eastern Montana, organic farmers and free-range ranchers comprise “a new breed of optimists,” as High Country News puts it, and are creating co-ops and building their own mills and bakeries and packing operations, without the federal subsidies that conventional farmers get. Some farmers are creating full-processing operations, “from seed to sandwich” under the same roof, similar to the microbreweries popular in hip urban centers.”6
Someday, it may be common for farms and ranches to do double-duty as schoolyards. Just as some ranchers charge fees for hunting on their land, farmers and ranchers might attract extra income by providing space for hands-on business retreats, nature therapy, or education and rural experiences for young city dwellers. In Norway, farmers and teachers are working together to create new curricula. Students there spend part of the school year on the farm, immersed in science, nature, and food production. Alone, such practices would not be enough to save a small farm. But utilizing a farm or ranch for education could help a rural family remain on their land, create new jobs, and connect urban people to the sources of their food and to nature.
Courtney White takes this line of thinking further. He wants farmers to think of themselves as farmers of the future—literally. He proposes what he calls the “carbon ranch,” which would use food and stewardship to build soil and fight climate change. In fact, he sees climate change as an opportunity. A new generation of agrarians could accomplish large-scale removal of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere through plant photosynthesis and other land-based carbon sequestration activities, old and new. They would also be growing an expanded sense of purpose and identity.
The challenges of urban and suburban sprawl will always be thorny, but the creation of re-natured cities and suburbs, the new agrarianism, and restorative transportation offer antidotes to sprawl. So will a revived rural life, the resurgence of job-producing, life-enhancing rural regions and small towns. The division between urban and rural agriculture will continue to dissolve. Jobs, meaning, and a new sense of identity will grow.
The creation of personal identity, the pride and meaning that come from what Thomas Berry called the Great Work—the re-naturing of life—is key to the next nature movement.
Corey Sue Hutchinson has found her true purpose by mending topographical wounds. Like Janet Keating and Courtney White, she cares deeply about land. A decade ago, Hutchinson arrived for our first meeting, at the One-Stop Market, in a spray of gravel. She was driving her F-150 Ford pickup, with its side panel advertising her company: Aqua-Hab Aquatic Systems. She bounded out to meet me with a strong handshake: “Call me Corey Sue.” At thirty-eight, she was tan and muscular, her arms scarred from physical labor. On this day, her hair was woven into a long braid. She wore designer sunglasses, earrings, jeans, work boots, and a stylish cotton ball cap that said “No B.S.” I followed her in my car to northern New Mexico’s La Plata River. Which she planned to move.
When Corey Sue was a sophomore at Northern Michigan University, she decided to become a marine biologist, so she packed a bag of clothes, jumped on her bicycle and, with only four hundred dollars in her pocket, rode some two thousand miles to Oregon State University—where she learned she was prone to violent seasickness. She shifted to watershed management. In 1989, she accepted a job as a biologist in southern Colorado’s San Juan National Forest.
“I wanted to make a difference, to protect the environment,” she said. But she grew impatient with the government habit of “having meetings to plan meetings, and accomplishing little.” So in 1994, she gave up her plum job and generous pension and set out to join the growing number of private river restorers in the West.
During the past century, some—not all—ranchers and developers have dramatically altered and damaged rivers like this one, removing the thick vegetation and allowing cattle to collapse the banks with their hooves, which encourages erosion. One rancher even bulldozed this stretch of the La Plata into a straight line, making it more ditch than river. Now, gentleman ranchers, as some of the newcomers are called, have bought up parts of the West and often prevent public access. That’s the bad news. The good news is that some of them have become riverkeepers. The family that bought this land, through which the La Plata runs and where I spoke with Corey Sue, hired her to return it to a natural, winding pattern.
As she walked through the cheat grass and willows on the bank, swinging a walking stick made from a broomstick and bike handlebar, she talked of the river as if it were a person. Corey Sue explained how she pores over old photographs, especially aerial photos, of the way the river once was—and then hypothesizes what the river would have been like by now, if left to its own devices. She builds grade-control structures, creates vortex weirs, stabilizes banks with native protection of cottonwood logs, root wads, and willow, and hauls in boulders to reduce erosion. She operates the heavy equipment herself. “Clients seem to get a kick out of that, a little gal in the big D-9 bulldozer who actually knows what she’s doing.”
Corey Sue’s work is about sustainability, but it’s also about connecting people to nature, about creating—or re-creating—a purposeful place. She has completed dozens of river projects like this over the years. Her approach is part science, part art; she calls it “hydrologic voodoo.” Often, she operates more on gut instinct than from statistical data. Essentially, she speeds up geologic time, accomplishing in a few weeks what nature might take a century or more to do. Accelerating the process, if only by fifty years, can potentially prevent the permanent loss of some kinds of watershed. Her understanding of a river’s desire is sometimes eerie. After she began the La Plata project, the river flooded. “To my surprise, a new channel cut right where I was planning to put one. This river wants to get back to what it was.”
No doubt about it, Corey Sue is making a difference. “But humility is a requirement for this job,” she says. Once, the Animas, a river she worked hard to save from dumped cars and collapsed banks, shifted on its own and washed out everything she had done. “Sometimes Mother Nature has other ideas.”
I first wrote about Corey Sue years ago, so recently I called her up to ask how the work was going. She said she was still in business. “But now a lot more people are doing this. There’s more competition in river work and wetland restoration. So I feel like I was at the beginning of something, and now I’m surviving in a competitive world,” she said with pride. Some of her most recent work was on Colorado’s West Fork of the Mancos River, on a stretch that had been damaged by a small mining operation. She paused. “I want to emphasize something. Rivers are dynamic. They can be nudged, but they can’t be controlled.” There are, however, rivers of no return, she added. The ones that are so devastated by human industry and development that they can never be restored.
Like those mountaintops in West Virginia. Restoration has its limits.
The lesson here, though, is that resistance is not futile. Renewal is possible. Janet Keating and Corey Sue Hutchinson have made good lives for themselves. To paraphrase the ancient Greek ideal: one works to tame the savageness of man; the other works to make gentle the life of the world.
Young adults have always been drawn to the possibility of creating a new and better world. Those I meet often tell me that they would like to make a career of connecting people to nature. They want to know which college they should attend, what their opportunities for real careers might be. Such questions should be easier to answer.
Higher education has incorporated the lessons of sustainability into curricula, but the focus is primarily on efficiency, on sustaining the natural environment through smarter production and conservation of fuel. Less familiar is the approach of producing human intellectual and creative energy through the restorative and productive powers of the natural world. In the past, careers that connected humans to nature were either taken for granted (farming) or minimized, if recognized at all: forestry, park rangers, gardeners, landscape architects (sometimes), and after that, you could just about quit counting. At this writing, I’m not aware of any comprehensive career guide that offers information on the array of businesses that do or could reunite humans and the natural world: urban designers, teachers who use natural habitat as laboratory, health care workers, nature therapists, botanical gardeners, organic farmers, vanguard ranchers, nature-camp operators, gardening instructors, natural landscape architects, natural playscape designers, urban park planners, guides, outdoor play specialists, nature interpreters, and many others. When people begin to consider the career possibilities of human restoration through nature, their eyes light up: here is a positive, hopeful view of the human relationship with the Earth.
Many people would pursue such jobs, if career guides and other resources were available and widely known—and if these also described how any career can be molded in a way that restores both nature and human beings. Sooner or later, a school of higher education—perhaps a school that teaches teachers—is going to realize the potential and create an entire program devoted to connecting people to nature. Enter this program, learn about the benefits of human restoration through the natural world, and then decide what profession you will choose (law, education, urban planning, or any other) to apply that knowledge and intent. No matter what career is chosen as the tool to connect people to nature, this is a way to love the natural world and humanity, too, and make a living at it.
Having spent time with some who do pursue such careers or avocations, I am impressed with the infectious characteristic they seem to share. They’re happy. And they feel alive. Most of the individuals I’ve met work primarily with children and nature, so I may be seeing a subset with a particular propensity. And, frankly, the number of professionals who can be classified as working in the broad field of human-nature restoration is relatively small. But that number could grow quickly, given the right conditions. Some schools are already edging in this direction.
Not long ago, Arno Chrispeels, a science teacher at Poway High School in California, invited me to talk with his students about the changed relationship between the young and the natural world. I was prepared for twenty or so students to attend the talk. To my surprise, the auditorium was packed with over two hundred students. (They were given extra credit.) I braced for gum popping and note passing. But as I spoke, the students became intently curious, and not because I am a great speaker—I am adequate—but because of something else. I talked about two topics. First, the growing body of scientific evidence showing how outdoor experiences can enhance their ability to learn and think, expand their senses, and improve their physical and mental health. Their health, not an abstraction. Second, I talked about the fact that, because of climate change and the other crushing environmental problems that we face, everything in the coming decades must change. We’ll need new sources of energy; new types of agriculture; new urban design and new kinds of schools, workplaces, and health care. Whole new careers will emerge that have yet to be named.
As the students left the auditorium, I turned to Chrispeels and asked, “What was that about? Why were they paying such close attention? I didn’t expect that reaction.”
“Simple,” he said. “You said something positive about the future of the environment. They never hear that.”
A few weeks earlier, an expert on global climate change, from the University of California–San Diego, had addressed the same students. “Their eyes froze over,” said Chrispeels, who asked these same students to write down the dominant messages that they hear about the environment from media, environmentalists, and the wider culture. Most of the comments described two messages: pick up after yourself (nature is a chore); and the planet is in big trouble (but it’s too late to save it anyway). The students described the dominant tone they hear: “Humans are a bad environment for other humans.” “Ozone hole getting larger, global warming.” “The environment will die.” “The dangers of nature.” “Natural disaster.” “People are inherently bad.” “We will resort to artificial nature because we destroyed it all to make room for people.” “You will see the Earth reach its end.” And so on.
True, our relationship with the Earth is in deep trouble. Despair has become fashionable and is prescribed early. This is the primary media storyline: It’s too late, game over. No wonder, then, that so many young people are reluctant to suit up. Yes, we hear other messages, and a significant number of people are working hard on major environmental issues, but many more are not. In 2010, a series of polls and studies showed that Americans under the age of thirty-five, as a group, remain less engaged than older Americans on the issue of climate change; that, among all Americans, public concern about many environmental issues is at a twenty-year low. As I was writing this book, the Gulf Coast suffered from one of the largest environmental disasters in our history, and we do not yet know if that event will affect long-term values. But we do know that, because of a generational disengagement from experiences in the natural world, intimate knowledge of nature is declining. For the young and the old, this trend shows some signs of improvement, including an uptick in national park attendance after years of decline. Some press accounts attribute this news to the pressures of the Great Recession; but some of us believe that it may also be related to the thousands of people who have worked tirelessly in recent years to connect children to nature. Now the movement must turn to adults as well.
My contention throughout this book is that reconnecting to nature is one key to growing a larger environmental movement. That reconnection is visceral and immediately useful to many people’s lives. Encouraging personal reconnection does not mean less engagement with global environmental issues; it means more. To act, most of us need motivation beyond despair. EcoAmerica, a nonprofit group focused on changing environmental values, believes that the first-generation environmental argument (in recent decades) was about catastrophe; the second-generation arguments were about economic benefits—green jobs—and national security. If the polls are accurate, though, neither of these arguments worked well, on their own. We’re entering the era of the third-generation argument, which will give added focus to the intrinsic importance of the natural world to our health, our ability to learn, our happiness, our spirit.
Several weeks after my visit, Chrispeels gave his students a different assignment: Find a place in nature, spend a half hour alone in it, and write a one-page essay about the experience. Chrispeels shared the results with me. A theme ran through many of these essays: the students came home feeling better than when they left. Among their comments: “I saw things I never saw before.” “I heard new things.” One young man said he could “smell the beauty.” “When I sat down in nature to write this weekend I found myself reconnected, my insides and outsides.” “Nature, how I’ve been separated from you for so long. . . . There was something there that made me so happy. . . . I’ve found it’s so lost, it’s so deep within me. . . . I try to resurface it but it’s fading fast.” Two of the students went outside at night. One wrote that after lightning lit up her yard, everything looked “dark and scary, but honestly I felt so much more peaceful and relaxed in this nature environment than I have in a very long time.” A young woman wrote, “I saw more stars than I have probably ever seen in my entire life.” She had lived her life in cities, “where parks are distinguished plots of land with green grass carefully watered and mowed.” But now she noticed the sounds of birds and the wind in the trees, and she found that “it wasn’t boring at all being alone.”
Some of these students described their half hour as a life-changing experience. I wondered. After all, these young people had been prepped. During my visit to the school, I had described the scientific evidence suggesting that exposure to natural settings reduces stress, stimulates creativity and cognitive development, and tunes in all the senses. But these young people completed the connection on their own.
I would like to believe that they also caught a glimpse of a better future—that what they recalled or found new, during their half hour in nature, was a sense of the unnoticed world, of the possible, of hope.