This book’s epigraph comes from Henry David Thoreau’s description of his time on Mount Katahdin in The Maine Woods, published posthumously in 1864. Just over one hundred fifty years later, in the summer of 2016, President Barack Obama designated Katahdin Woods and Waters National Monument, 87,500 acres of the wilderness Thoreau wrote about in his book. “I looked with awe at the ground I trod on,” he reported, “to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man’s garden, but the unhandselled globe. It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor waste-land. It was the fresh and natural surface of the planet Earth.”
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American spends 93 percent of his or her life indoors. That includes 87 percent in buildings and 6 percent in cars. That also means that we spend, on average, only 7 percent of our life outside. See “The National Human Activity Pattern Survey” (NHAPS) in Journal of Exposure Analysis and Environmental Epidemiology 11 (2001): 231–252; 10.1038/sj.jea.7500165.
In the United States alone, pavements and other impervious surfaces cover more than 43,000 square miles—an area nearly the size of Ohio—according to research published in the June 15, 2004, issue of Eos, the newsletter of the American Geophysical Union.
For more on soil sealing, see “Assessment of Soil Sealing Management Responses, Strategies, and Targets Toward Ecologically Sustainable Urban Land Use Management,” Ambio 43, no. 4 (May 2014): 530–541. See also “Soil Sealing” from the Global Soil Forum at globalsoilweek.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/11/GSW_factsheet_Sealing_en.pdf.
Especially as I began this book, the idea of pilgrimage was important. To walk the Gettysburg battleground, for example, where the First Minnesota’s charge saved the second day; to see for myself Nebraska’s Platte River with migrating sandhill cranes gathered tens of thousands strong—these were places I had always wanted to know. In The Art of Pilgrimage, Phil Cousineau writes that pilgrimage “means following in the footsteps of somebody or something we honor to pay homage.” That is what often drew me to the places I went.
A dear friend of mine, Thomas Becknell, referred me to Cousineau’s book, and while I did not directly focus on the idea of pilgrimage, it’s remarkable to me now how much of what he says about pilgrimage rings true. For example, pilgrimage is, he writes, “transformative travel to sacred places.” And how to get there? “The oldest practice is still the best. Take your soul for a stroll. Long walks, short walks, morning walks, evening walks… walking is the best way.”
One gift of physical travel, of getting away from where you normally live, is that of perspective—you see your home anew. But ultimately most of us want to return. As Cousineau says, “The true pilgrimage is into the undiscovered land of your own imagination, which you could not have explored any other way than through these lands.” This reminds me that Henry David Thoreau—who went to the Walden woods to gain perspective on life in his hometown—encouraged each of us to be “the Lewis and Clark of your own streams and rivers,” and proclaimed with some pride that he had “traveled a good bit in Concord”—the town where he lived. I could have gone almost anywhere; what mattered is that I would go.
How do you grow four hundred trees and several stretches of lawn two hundred feet above the ground on the roof of a national memorial? At the National September 11 Memorial the turfgrass grows in beds eighteen inches deep, rooted in a sandy mix topped by three inches of topsoil. The swamp white oaks come in ten-by-ten crates, together needing forty thousand tons of soil. The tree roots will follow a dripline through tunnels, growing together beneath the concrete. Eventually, the trees will grow eighty feet tall, coming together to form a canopy. Just as the grass invites but is off limits, so this memorial is nature but not really. Even if you want to invite millions of visitors under the healing shade of growing trees, you still need to keep their boots and shoes on concrete.
While the oldest “shoes” found thus far have been dated back thousands of centuries, in eras such as that of ancient Greece, whole societies were essentially shoeless. The original Olympic athletes, for example, participated without shoes (or clothes, for that matter), and even the society’s gods and heroes were portrayed without shoes. And it’s crazy to imagine that Alexander the Great created his empire with armies of barefoot soldiers.
For most of us, walking is easy to take for granted, but as one study notes, walking is a “complex dynamic task that requires the generation of whole-body angular momentum to maintain dynamic balance while performing a wide range of locomotor subtasks such as providing body support, forward propulsion and accelerating the leg into swing.” See “Muscle Contributions to Whole-Body Sagittal Plane Angular Momentum during Walking” in the Journal of Biomechanics 44, no. 1 (January 4, 2011): 6–12. Or, in other words, there’s a whole lot going on in our bodies as we walk down the street. Our muscles “accelerate body segments and generate ground reaction forces that alter angular momentum. In addition, gravity contributes to whole-body angular momentum through its contribution of the ground reaction forces.” As have bears and great apes, we humans are among the few animals to have evolved walking on our heels first, then rolling onto the ball of the foot and our toes. In fact, this heel-first approach is 53 percent more efficient than walking on the balls of our feet, and a whopping 83 percent more efficient than walking on our toes.
Our human ancestors began walking some three to seven million years ago, with Homo sapiens taking foot 200,000 years in the past, and we have the bones, muscles, and breathing to show for it. Fossil bones show the evolution of a gradual ability to walk upright—thigh bones angled to support the body’s weight, knee bones made to absorb the stress of briefly standing on one leg as we walk, the curve of our spine acting as a shock absorber while connecting underneath our skull to hold our head upright. By comparison, a chimpanzee’s spine attaches at the back of its head, keeping the head at an angle; its thigh bones and knees can’t support walking upright for long. Scientists suspect that we evolved to walk upright in order to better access food—reach for higher fruits, chase mammals, travel to new grounds. In other words, not so different from our lives today.
Find the article “To Age Well, Walk” at http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/27/to-age-well-walk/?_r=0. Here, Gretchen Reynolds reports the results of “one of the largest and longest-running studies of its kind,” published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, explaining that “regular exercise, including walking, significantly reduces the chance that a frail older person will become physically disabled.” Find Tom Vanderbilt’s fascinating article “The Crisis in American Walking” in Slate at http://www.slate.com/articles/life/walking/2012/04/why_don_t_americans_walk_more_the_crisis_of_pedestrianism_.html. Says Vanderbilt, “America is a country that has forgotten how to walk.”
In Beyond Geography: The Western Spirit Against the Wilderness (1982), Frederick W. Turner described a world none of us will ever know: “To those who followed Columbus and Cortes the New World truly seemed incredible, not only because of what civilization had made of the Old World but because of the natural endowments of the one they now began to enter. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean.… Giovanni di Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out… (and) ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers.”
For more on John Randel Jr. and his mapping of Manhattan, see “The Grid at 200: Lines That Shaped Manhattan,” at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/arts/design/manhattan-street-grid-at-museum-of-city-of-new-york.html. See also “No Hero in 1811, Street Grid’s Father Was Showered With Produce, Not Praise,” at http://historynewsnetwork.org/article/137854. Marguerite Holloway’s book, The Measure of Manhattan: The Tumultuous Career and Surprising Legacy of John Randel Jr., was published in 2013.
Like so many others, I “love maps.” When I say that, I don’t mean the highly functional map on my iPhone, the map I use nearly every day. I mean paper maps, the kind you can fold out on the table before you, lean over, and study with joy. I’m certainly old enough to remember when these were the only kinds of maps we had, and at least for me, when I say I love maps, one thing I’m saying is that I love the feeling of curiosity that comes over me as I view them, a sense of traveling while barely leaving my seat. I so often have a sense of wanting to go to places on the map. Stephen S. Hall writes, “The most important thing a map shows, if we pause to look at it long enough, if we travel upon it widely enough, if we think about it hard enough, is all the things we still do not know.”
My thanks to Shanil Virani, director of the John C. Wells Planetarium at James Madison University, for helping me to understand the reasons we aren’t flung from the Earth’s surface as it spins at a thousand miles an hour.
As you might expect, NASA offers a wealth of information on gravity, or rather the lack of it. One example, “The Beating Heart, Minus Gravity,” reports that astronauts who appear to be floating in space are actually in a kind of free fall, being pulled by gravity toward Earth. And lucky them, for if this weren’t the case, they “would travel in a straight line away from the Earth.” For more on gravity, see Brian Clegg’s book Gravity: How the Weakest Force in the Universe Shaped Our Lives (St. Martin’s, 2012).
Perhaps the thing that is most impressive about Eric Sanderson is his vision, both of the past and the future. For example, when Sanderson looks four hundred years into the future, he likes what he sees. A city, a megacity, in this case New York City, with more inhabitants than now, with streams running alongside streets, streets with few cars, cars without drivers. He sees local produce from countryside close by, the surrounding New York and New Jersey farmland reborn, returned to nineteenth-century roots when it was the largest farming market in the country. His is the kind of vision that can inspire, that while realistic about our coming struggles can imagine us thriving beyond them. He can see not only the world that we are losing but the one we might create. For more, see his wonderful Terra Nova: The New World After Oil, Cars, and Suburbs (Henry Abrams, 2013). See also his work on “The Nature of Cities” at http://www.thenatureofcities.com/author/ericsanderson/.
Originally the New York Zoological Society, Eric Sanderson’s employer the Wildlife Conservation Society “works to conserve more than two million square miles of wild places around the world.” Find them at https://www.wcs.org. Find the World Wildlife Fund study that Sanderson quotes, “Living Planet Report 2014,” at http://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2014. The dire news: “Population sizes of vertebrate species—mammals, birds, reptiles, amphibians, and fish—have declined by 52 percent over the last 40 years.”
Learn more about the maps created by Sanderson and his colleagues at http://bioscience.oxfordjournals.org/content/52/10/891.full. For better or for worse, they report, “the influence of human beings on the planet has become so pervasive that it is hard to find adults in any country who have not seen the environment around them reduced in natural values during their lifetimes.” Sanderson and his colleagues call land transformation “the single greatest threat to biological diversity.” Nonetheless, they report, “This phenomenon and its implications are not fully appreciated by the larger human community, which does not recognize them in its economic systems or in most of its political decisions.”
Among their effects, the maps created by Sanderson and his colleagues could especially address two different sets of people. The first is people who have no idea—people who think that if you get out of the city, or the state, or the country, there is plenty of “wild” left. Sanderson’s maps show that this simply isn’t true. But the maps are also important for someone who has heard enough about what’s happening in the world to wonder, What’s the use of trying to make a difference? As I learned over the course of my journey, there is no shortage of compelling reasons to be trying as hard as possible right now.
Another set of maps shows that “urbanization, agriculture, and energy could gobble up 20 percent of the world’s remaining natural land by 2050.” The authors argue that “with development increasingly encroaching into more remote and previously undisturbed areas, it is critical that international corporations, governments and conservation organizations collaborate to reduce and minimize potential future impacts on remaining habitats.” Find the study “A World at Risk: Aggregating Development Trends to Forecast Global Habitat Conversion,” at http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0138334#pone-0138334-g004.
A recent study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences argues that “’Pristine landscapes simply do not exist and, in most cases, have not existed for millennia”: see http://phys.org/news/2016-06-pristine-landscapes-havent-thousands-years.html. For some, this would seem to undermine efforts to conserve wild places. As a Washington Post article began, “Implicit in much, if not all, modern environmental sentiment is the idea that the natural world has been despoiled by humans—and if we could just leave it alone, things would get better”: visit https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2016/06/06/theres-basically-no-landscape-on-earth-that-hasnt-been-altered-by-humans-scientists-say/?utm_term=.8d72c45b2d5a. But this is a shallow understanding of “modern environmental sentiment.” Far more common is the understanding that areas don’t have to be “pristine” or “wild”—which anyway are human conceits—to be worthy of conservation. Most environmental thinkers understand that especially if we include in the human footprint such human-caused influences as climate change and chemical pollution, there are no such things as “pristine” or completely “wild” areas left on Earth. But so what? There are still places of compelling beauty and biodiversity that deserve our greatest efforts and care.
Find Maya Lin’s powerful memorial—one in which each of us is invited to participate—at http://www.whatismissing.net. The memorial’s goals? To “raise awareness of what we are losing and to show you what you can do to help.”
For a wonderful image of the built environment below Manhattan streets, see National Geographic’s “New York Underground” at http://www.nationalgeographic.com/features/97/nyunderground/.
In 1864, the same year Thoreau’s The Maine Woods was published, and a year after the battle of Gettysburg, Jules Verne published Journey to the Centre of the Earth. The story of three men traveling under Iceland’s volcanoes, the novel is nearly as fascinating today as it must have been at its publication. “Words of human language are inadequate to describe the discoveries of one who ventures into the deep abysses of the Earth,” wrote Verne.
Of course, no human has actually journeyed to the Earth’s center, and the trip is impossible for a number of reasons, not the least of which the heat would melt any human who tried. Anyway, to get there would first require cutting through 20 to 45 miles of crust, followed by 1,800 miles of mantle, and then through the 10,000-degree liquid-iron core, not to mention overcoming the pressure exerted by 6.6 sextillion tons of rock pressing inward.
This doesn’t mean that humans aren’t continuing to drill into the Earth. For one fascinating story about doing just this, listen to NPR’s “Drilling to the Mantle of the Earth,” at http://www.npr.org/2011/03/25/134855888/Drilling-To-The-Mantle-Of-The-Earth.
Along with the growth in the number of megacities comes the growth of megaregions, where several megacities are joined together. The America 2050 initiative, reported at http://www.america2050.org/content/megaregions.html, shows the United States as having several megaregions by 2050, and not only the Eastern Seaboard or Los Angeles, but also areas including the Front Range of Colorado, the Seattle–Portland corridor, and the Atlantic–Charlotte region. The challenge for conservationists is how to include healthy nature (and access to nature for humans) amid all the development.
To learn more about all things concrete, see Robert Courland’s Concrete Planet: The Strange and Fascinating Story of the World’s Most Common Man-Made Material (Prometheus, 2011). Courland told me simply, “Concrete dominates the human environment. Nothing is as representative of modern and postmodern society as steel reinforced concrete.” As the New York Times’s Elisabeth Rosenthal writes, “cement is literally the glue of progress.” One of the main reasons to pay attention to our paving of the world and our use of concrete is, as Courland told me, “making concrete cement is particularly a dirty business.” In fact, the production of concrete cement ranks second only to automobiles and coal-fired power plants in generating greenhouse gases. “The cement industry admits to generating 10 percent of all the CO2 produced,” Courland explained, “but this is a conservative estimate… it’s probably at least 15 percent.” While cement manufacturers have spent millions in an attempt to make their industry more “green,” the skyrocketing demand for concrete cement around the world has essentially canceled out those improvements.
For more information on how Mexico City is sinking, see http://www.homelandsecuritynewswire.com/mexico-citys-sinking-worsening), as well as “Why Is Mexico City Sinking?” at https://www.theguardian.com/science/2004/may/06/thisweekssciencequestions.
“They are about to go extinct,” says biologist Sandra Balderas Arias of the axolotl, in an article titled “Mythic Salamander Faces Crucial Test: Survival in the Wild” at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/31/world/americas/struggle-of-axolotls-mexicos-mythical-salamander.html. For more, see “In Mexico, the ajolote’s fate lies in troubled waters” at http://articles.latimes.com/2012/oct/01/world/la-fg-mexico-magic-salamander-20121002.
One of Mexico’s greatest gifts to the visitor is its museums. See especially the National Museum of Anthropology, where the nation’s incredibly rich human history is on display. In the section covering the Aztecs, one sculpture description reads, “This large container for the food of the gods, mainly blood and human hearts.”
Before my visit to Mexico City, I spoke with Dennis Blanton, an archeologist in Virginia, about his profession. He told me he sees as his goal to find the human story in the ground, especially from those times in history when people weren’t telling that story in writing. I asked, Why should we do that? “The most straightforward answer is that we build our identities around heritage,” he had said. “We’re not made out of a vacuum of thoughts; we are products of the heritage and the past. It shapes us, and in less than obvious ways. And the fundamental issues that confront us now? They’re not new ones. If you want to understand present circumstances, even yourself, you have to reflect back.”
In his seminal book Life and Death in the Templo Mayor, Eduardo Matos Moctezuma describes the “unique opportunity to break through the thick barrier of concrete that covers the city of Tenochtitlán and, archeologically, to peer through the window of time and recover a time gone by.” After spending time with Matos Moctezuma, it’s clear to me that our modern manner of living separated from the natural cycle of life and death would have completely confused the Aztecs. “You must keep the cycle going,” I can imagine them saying. “You must recognize that in order for us to live, something must die.” Returning from the fifteenth century, as I stepped from the site, I found the Aztec values far less crazy than I might have before my visit. The carving out of human hearts may still repulse me, but not the values behind the ritual. Not the notion that ensuring that the creation that sustains us continues is largely in our hands.
The graphic from National Geographic, as well as a wonderful article on the Aztecs, can be found at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2010/11/greatest-aztec/draper-text.
The epigraph comes from Wendell Berry’s brilliant book The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture (Sierra Club, 1977).
London’s Crossrail project has garnered plenty of deserved publicity. The intricacy of placing a railroad underneath one of the world’s oldest cities and the archeological discoveries that have resulted have fascinated the world. One wonderful source is the National Geographic article “London’s Big Dig Reveals Amazing Layers of History,” from its February 2016 issue: visit http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2016/02/artifacts-found-under-london-archaeology-text. The New Yorker’s article (“Bedlam’s Big Dig”) includes this observation: “There is a lot of death here in Liverpool Street,” Jay Carver, Crossrail’s lead archeologist, said as we looked down from a platform over the site. “A lot of dead people,”: it’s at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/london-crossrail-bedlam-big-dig. Other articles include such cleverly descriptive titles as “London Crossrail Dig Hits Beheaded Romans” (Forbes), “The Monster Tunneling Under London Streets” (BBC), and “Cremated human bones in pot found in Crossrail dig suggest gruesome ritual” (The Guardian).
The treasures found during the Crossrail dig continue London’s long underground history. Peter Ackroyd’s London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets (Doubleday, 2011) is a great place to learn more. Incredibly, the history lies immediately below your feet. As you walk in the city, Ackroyd explains, “You are also treading on the city of the past, all of its history from the prehistoric settlers to the present day packed within 24 feet of earthen fabric.” In terms of dead people, echoing Jay Carver above, Ackroyd reports that “from Roman London alone there issued a million corpses.”
One of the most famous corpses to be found in recent years—though not in London but in Leicester—was that of King Richard III, whose remains were found buried under parking lot asphalt. For more on this mind-boggling story, see “DNA Confirms: Here Lieth Richard III Under Yon Parking Lot” at http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2014/12/141202-richard-iii-genes-shakespeare-science/.
Speaking of Roman London, visitors to the modern city can purchase a map of Londinium made by the Museum of London that superimposes the historical city over the much larger modern city boundaries. Anyone visiting the modern city would do well to spend time at the Museum of London, a sometimes forgotten attraction that holds a wealth of information and story about one of the world’s most fascinating cities.
To find out more about Graham Rook’s work, see the articles “Regulation of the immune system by biodiversity from the natural environment: An ecosystem service essential to health” at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24154724, and “Microbial ‘old friends,’ immunoregulation and socioeconomic status” at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24401109. “Epidemiological studies suggest that living close to the natural environment is associated with long-term health benefits,” begins the first paper. Or, as Rook told me, “It was just very striking that you will more likely drop dead in that five-year period (of a UK study)… if you did not live close to green space.”
Michael Pollan’s article “Some of My Best Friends Are Germs” appeared in the New York Times Magazine on May 15, 2013.
The titles of recent articles point to an increased awareness of the value of dirt for human health. “Is Dirt the New Prozac?” (Discover), “How the ‘Dirt Cure’ Can Make for Healthier Families” (New York Times), and “Healthy Soil Microbes, Healthy People” (The Atlantic) are just a few. When it comes to public health, this is a change. “Enter the terms ‘soil’ and ‘health’ into a PubMed database,” reports Daphne Miller, MD, in an article titled “The Surprising Healing Qualities… of Dirt,” “and the top search results portray soil as a risky substance, filled with pathogenic yeasts, antibiotic-resistant bacteria, radon, heavy metals, and pesticides.” But move beyond these reports, Miller says, and “you will discover a small, but growing, collection of research that paints soil in a very different light”; see http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/how-to-eat-like-our-lives-depend-on-it/how-dirt-heals-us.
For more on the link between soil and human health, an excellent place to start is the work of Dr. Eric C. Brevik. See “The past, present, and future of soils and human health studies” at http://www.soil-journal.net/1/35/2015/soil-1-35-2015.pdf, as well as his book Soils and Human Health (Taylor & Francis, 2012).
As more and more of us live in cities, contact with the natural ground will become increasingly vital. Green spaces and parks, trees and water—an ever-growing list of studies support the idea that we are healthier people when we have contact with nature. “How green cities are better for us physically and psychologically” (Globe and Mail), “Urban green space delivers big happiness boost” (Conservation), and “Why living around nature could make you live longer” (Washington Post) are typical of recent headlines making this case. If we accept this as fact, the implications for the ways we develop our cities are many. If we want to be healthy, these studies seem to argue, we cannot continue to pave the world. Unfortunately, in many cities around the world, living in urban areas means being cut off from nature. “Global Urbanization and the Separation of Humans from Nature” reports that “within cities worldwide, most residents are concentrated in neighborhoods of impoverished biodiversity.” Too often, those most affected are children. For more information on the story of the Oxford Junior Dictionary removing nature-oriented words, see “Panic at the Dictionary” at http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/panic-dictionary).
While it has yet to gain traction in the medical community, the idea of “grounding” or “earthing” for human health has an increasing number of supporters. “Multi-disciplinary research has revealed that electrically conductive contact of the human body with the surface of the Earth produces intriguing effects on physiology and health,” reports one recent article. See “The effects of grounding (earthing) on inflammation, the immune response, wound healing, and prevention and treatment of chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases” at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4378297/.
For more on E. O. Wilson’s theory of biophilia, see his book Biophilia: The Human Bond with Other Species (Harvard, 1984). Among Wilson’s many other books are Consilience (1999), Letters to a Young Scientist (2014), The Meaning of Human Existence (2014), and Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (2015). A scientist with the ability to translate data into story, Wilson—well into his eighties—continues to do all he can to protect and conserve the world’s biodiversity. Without this life, he warns, we risk entering a new age he calls “Eremocene, the Age of Loneliness”: see http://www.economist.com/news/21589083-man-must-do-more-preserve-rest-life-earth-warns-edward-o-wilson-professor-emeritus. Wilson is well aware of the life at our feet, writing in his book The Creation, “Each cubic meter of soil and humus within it is a world swarming with hundreds of thousands of such creatures, representing hundreds of species. In one gram of soil, less than a handful, live on the order of ten billion bacteria belonging to as many as six thousand species.”
For helping me understand how we might design our cities with biophilia in mind, my thanks go to Dr. Timothy Beatley of the University of Virginia. “A biophilic city is a city abundant with nature,” he writes in his Biophilic Cities (Island, 2010), “a city that looks for opportunities to repair and restore and creatively insert nature wherever it can.” Find out more about biophilic cities at biophiliccities.org. Among other things, Beatley writes, “a biophilic city is an outdoor city, a city that makes walking and strolling and daily exposure to the outside elements and weather possible and a priority.” Appropriately, my conversations with Tim took place while we strolled the UVA campus, one designed by the man Beatley calls our first “biophilic president,” Thomas Jefferson.
For more on the Campaign to Protect Rural England, visit http://www.cpre.org.uk. One of the unfortunate trends that CPRE is trying to slow is that of the paving of front yards in England, mostly to provide parking space for additional automobiles. Called “front gardens” in the UK, these patches of once-natural ground have been paved at an incredible rate—in London, for example, the number paved was up 36 percent in just a decade. See http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/three-times-as-many-front-gardens-completely-paved-as-a-decade-ago-says-royal-horticultural-society-10256660.html.
Published in 1993, James Howard Kunstler’s The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (Touchstone) remains on point nearly twenty-five years later. The entire book is Kunstler’s attempt to wake us from our lack of attention to the environment around us. “Americans evince a striking complacency when it comes to their everyday environment and the growing calamity that it represents,” he writes.
The Cedar Creek Battlefield is easily found near the intersection of Interstates 81 and 66 in northern Virginia. If you go, make sure to visit the small museum at Hupp’s Hill Civil War Park in Strasburg, where Mike Kehoe’s many archeological finds fill the display cases. For more information, see http://ccbf.us.
Find out more about the map of roads with every other feature removed at http://io9.gizmodo.com/a-map-of-u-s-roads-and-nothing-else-483183413. The high-resolution version of the map is especially striking. See also “These crazy maps show just how much ground roads cover” at http://grist.org/living/these-crazy-maps-show-just-how-much-ground-roads-cover/.
The study by Nick Haddad and others, “Habitat fragmentation and its lasting impact on Earth’s ecosystems,” can be found at http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/1/2/e1500052. For an excellent article on this study and on the effect of roads in general, see “What Roads Have Wrought” by Michelle Nijhuis in The New Yorker at http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/roads-habitat-fragmentation. The information that “more than 25 million kilometres of new roads will be built worldwide by 2050” comes from the article “Study shows where on the planet new roads should and should not go” at http://www.cam.ac.uk/research/news/study-shows-where-on-the-planet-new-roads-should-and-should-not-go, which details a new report published in the journal Nature, “A global strategy for road building” at http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v513/n7517/abs/nature13717.html.
Despite studies such as these, roads continue to be built in places where they will almost certainly do significant ecological harm. The American ecologist Aldo Leopold saw this in the 1940s as he was writing A Sand County Almanac. The line from that book, “To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really needs,” remains—as does so much of Leopold’s work—prescient for our day. For example, a paved road is proposed that would cut directly through Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park. Despite the fact that a road could be built that would meet the same goals but avoid the park by staying south of its border—the construction of which would be supported by the German federal government—the Tanzanian government continues to threaten the most disruptive option. For anyone interested in helping stop what scientists say would be an ecological catastrophe, visit Serengetiwatch.org. “If we can’t save the Serengeti,” they ask, “what can we save?”
One bright spot comes in the continued success of “The Roadless Rule,” originally declared by President Bill Clinton in 2001, a rule that protects more than fifty-eight million square miles of roadless areas in US national forests. The battle over this rule, its implementation and maintenance, is explained in “The Nine Lives of the Roadless Rule,” by Harvard’s Richard Lazarus at environment.law.harvard.edu/wp-content/…/12/Lazarus_Forum_2015_Nov-Dec.pdf.
Much has been written about the costs of sprawl to human and environmental health. Among the most helpful to understanding these costs are “Vanishing Open Spaces: How an Exploding US Population Is Devouring the Land that Feeds and Nourishes Us” by NumbersUSA, at https://www.numbersusa.com/resource-download/vanishing-open-spaces; “Paving Paradise: Sprawl and the Environment” at nrdc.org/cities/smartgrowth/rpave.asp, from the Natural Resources Defense Council; and “Paving Paradise: The Peril of Impervious Surfaces” by Lance Frazer at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1257665/. The latter includes the information that “paved surfaces are quite possibly the most ubiquitous structures created by humans.”
In addition to their value for our physical, mental, and spiritual health (not to mention their value for wildlife, plants, and soil), one of the most compelling reasons for preserving open spaces is their monetary value. Factors such as their effect on property values, their value in terms of environmental services such as groundwater rejuvenation, and—especially—avoiding the inevitable costs of sprawl, mean hundreds of millions of dollars for surrounding communities. See, for example, http://thecostofsprawl.com, and “How Much Sprawl Costs America” at http://www.citylab.com/housing/2015/03/how-much-sprawl-costs-america/388481/. The estimate? One trillion dollars a year. That these open spaces are often sacrificed in a way that benefits developers and investors rather than local communities is something we would be wise to better understand. Unfortunately, explains the report from NumbersUSA, “Sprawl and the loss of open spaces themselves don’t get nearly the attention from the news media, politicians and national public interest groups that they did a decade ago. But the losses have not stopped.”
One of the most damaging effects of paving over natural ground is creation of impervious surfaces. The transformation of previously natural ground into impervious surfaces such as roads, parking lots, and roofs has disrupted the natural hydrologic cycle of rainfall soaking into the ground. As a result, “stormwater runoff” picks up pollutants that poison streams, rivers, and wetlands, and keeps it from recharging aquifers. Runoff pollution is now the leading threat to the nation’s water quality, affecting about 40 percent of surveyed rivers, lakes, and estuaries. Bodies of water all around the country, from the Great Lakes to the Everglades to the rivers of the Pacific Northwest, are being damaged by runoff from paved impervious surfaces.
For an excellent summary of Eran Ben-Joseph’s study of parking lots, see “Paved, but Still Alive” by Michael Kimmelman of the New York Times at http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/08/arts/design/taking-parking-lots-seriously-as-public-spaces.html?_r=0. Kimmelman reports that in his “Rethinking a Lot,” Ben-Joseph points out that “in some US cities, parking lots cover more than a third of the land area, becoming the single most salient landscape feature of our built environment.”
For a wonderful article on the pressures from development faced by US Civil War Battlefields, see Adam Goodheart’s article “US Civil War battlefields see new conflict” at http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0504/feature5/. Goodheart tells the story of “a quickly vanishing America of small farms and crossroads villages and a newer landscape of megamalls and sprawling McMansions.” Much of the Civil War landscape, he writes, “has been obliterated, often by developments whose names give hollow echo to the Civil War’s guns—Artillery Ridge, Lee’s Parke.” Against such reckless development works the Civil War Trust. Find out more about their efforts at http://www.civilwar.org.
While I knew the general history of the US Civil War in the Shenandoah Valley area (to which I moved in 2012), I had no idea of the depth and breadth of this history. One of the first to clue me in to this was Laura Greenleaf, a friend from the International Dark-Sky Association, who grew up in rural northwest Virginia and told me the story of the day she dug the grave to bury her childhood dog in her backyard and struck a Confederate belt buckle. My thanks to Laura for helping me understand how at the heart of, as she says, “the suburbanization of Virginia… is a loss of a sense of place, of place identity,” and how because during the war “the scale of the action—the size of troop movement and encampments—were such, really no ground was untouched in the valley.”
The chapter’s epigraph comes from Abraham Lincoln’s Lyceum Address, delivered in Springfield, Illinois, on January 27, 1838. In the speech, the future president warned against the dangers of slavery in the United States.
For more on Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address twenty-five years later, and the idea of consecrating the battlefield as “hallowed ground,” see Jeffrey B. Roth’s “Consecrating Hallowed Ground” from the New York Times at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/20/consecrating-hallowed-ground/?_r=0. It’s nearly impossible for the modern visitor to the battlefield to understand what it would have been like on November 19, 1863. Roth writes that “for months, the smell of decaying bodies saturated large portions of the 50 square miles around Gettysburg. Bodies, body parts, dead horses and the remains of military equipment littered the battlefield.” When Lincoln toured the battlefield, Roth reports, “the skeletal remains of the rib cages of horses remained visible on portions of the field.”
The authoritative book on the First Minnesota’s heroics during the battle is Brian Leehan’s Pale Horse at Plum Run: The First Minnesota at Gettysburg (Minnesota Historical Society, 2002). Originally from Minnesota himself, world-renowned historian James M. McPherson’s Hallowed Ground: A Walk at Gettysburg (Crown, 2003) is a short and pleasant journey around the battlefield. Drew Gilpin Faust’s best-selling This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (Vintage, 2009) details how utterly unprepared Americans—including those in the two armies—were for the war’s carnage.
On the third day of the Gettysburg battle, the forty-seven remaining soldiers from Minnesota took part in defeating Pickett’s Charge. It was a battle in which the First Minnesota captured the battle flag of the Twenty-Eighth regiment from Virginia. Since then, the flag has been kept at the Minnesota capitol in St. Paul, and overtures from Virginia for its return—the latest coming in 2013—have been politely rebuffed. For more, see http://blogs.mprnews.org/statewide/2013/06/no-virginia-there-will-be-no-battle-flag-for-the-gettysburg-anniversary.
One of the questions Park Service employees at Gettysburg are sometimes asked is whether any of the trees on the battlefield today were “witness trees,” if they were present at the battle in 1863. When I asked John Commito about this, he told me, “I don’t believe there are any witness trees still on the battlefield. In my time out on the battlefield with rangers in various places, they’d say, No, you can look all around here, even though some of these trees are big, none of them are witness trees.” But then he added, “It may be possible that there are witness trees that they’re just not telling people about.”
Kent Gramm’s excellent books include November: Lincoln’s Elegy at Gettysburg (Indiana University, 2001), Gettysburg: This Hallowed Ground (Tide-Mark, 2004), and Sharpsburg: A Civil War Narrative (Resource, 2015).
Find Wendell Berry’s wonderful essay “The Pleasures of Eating” at https://www.ecoliteracy.org/article/wendell-berry-pleasures-eating. It’s said that a single sentence from Berry’s essay inspired Michael Pollan’s books about food and eating. See “The Wendell Berry Sentence That Inspired Michael Pollan’s Obsession with Food” at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/04/the-wendell-berry-sentence-that-inspired-michael-pollans-food-obsession/275209/. There are so many good sentences in this single essay that it’s hard to choose those to quote, but here are a few more: “The food industrialists have by now persuaded millions of consumers to prefer food that is already prepared. They will grow, deliver, and cook your food for you and (just like your mother) beg you to eat it. That they do not yet offer to insert it, prechewed, into our mouth is only because they have found no profitable way to do so.”
To find out everything you would want to know about Helen Browning, her work, her farm, visiting her farm, and buying her food, visit http://www.helenbrowningsorganic.co.uk. The farm now features a bed-and-breakfast, and the food at The Royal Oak is phenomenal. For more on Britain’s Soil Association, visit www.soilassociation.org.
One morning during my visit to Helen’s farm, fueled by a “proper English breakfast” from The Royal Oak featuring fried eggs, tomatoes, and bacon and sausage from Helen’s pigs, I decided to hike along the Ridgeway, Britain’s oldest road, which crosses close to Bishopstone. Now recognized as a National Trail some eighty-seven miles long, the Ridgeway has been a road for more than five thousand years. Helen told me that as a child she knew it simply as the “Roman Road.” And indeed, the Romans used the Ridgeway, but so did scores of peoples before them, and scores afterward. The section I walked is basically a two-track gravel road about ten feet wide. No motor vehicles are allowed, just me and the horses carrying riders from out of the past. They came around corners, clip-clopping their way as though we were sharing a moment from two hundred years ago. “Morning,” one said, but that was about it.
I walked to the Bronze Age Uffington White Horse, a massive prehistoric horse figure carved into the side of the ridge some two thousand to three thousand years ago. I could have sworn that Helen had described the horse as a “sculpture,” and so as I was making my approach I was looking around for a big white horse carved of chalk, the kind of thing that might be rearing up outside Denver’s airport. Streams of English visitors were passing me, teenagers in packs, families pushing strollers and pulling grandparents, everyone blown about by a blustery wind. “Is the horse around here?” I finally asked a passerby. “Sure is, mate,” as he pointed to the other side of the ridge. I wandered over—I obviously hadn’t yet remembered the cover of my 1986 XTC English Settlement album, or I would have known what it was I was supposed to see. And even when I did see it, I didn’t. Because the Uffington White Horse “sculpture” is carved into the ground, and it’s huge, up close a white chalk pit (the back of the horse? the legs?). I love that this is a sculpture in the ground—of the ground—and that it has lasted. The Uffington White Horse—it’s like a tattoo on the earth, a mark that says we were here, once upon a time.
To get a quick sense of the incredible biodiversity in soil, visit http://www.fao.org/soils-portal/soil-biodiversity/facts-and-figures/en/. The web pages for the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations are, in general, a great place to start learning more about soil.
To find out more about the experiment carried out in the soil of New York City’s Central Park by Noah Fierer, Diana Wall, and others, see “Beneath Central Park, a Teeming Universe” at http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/10/02/beneath-central-park-a-teeming-universe/. Among the article’s opening lines: “Biologists found a staggering 167,000 kinds of microbes living in the park’s soil—the vast majority of them never before documented.”
Dr. Diana Wall was an immense support for me while writing this book, spending time with me during my visit to her Colorado State University offices and labs, talking by phone, and visiting my classes during her visit to James Madison University. Among her achievements is leading the creation of the worldwide Global Soil Biodiversity Initiative and the world’s first Global Soil Biodiversity Atlas. Find out more about her work at http://wp.natsci.colostate.edu/walllab/people/dr-diana-h-wall/.
For more about the GSBI, visit https://globalsoilbiodiversity.org/node/271, and see “The Hidden World Under Our Feet” by Jim Robbins at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/12/opinion/sunday/the-hidden-world-of-soil-under-our-feet.html.
Increasing numbers of articles and studies report on the priceless value of microbes and microbiomes. For a sample, try “What lies beneath” at http://www.nature.com/news/2008/081008/full/455724a.html; “Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk?” at http://e360.yale.edu/feature/is_climate_change_putting_world_microbiomes_at_risk/2977/; and “Scientists Urge National Initiative on Microbiomes” at http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/29/science/national-initiative-microbes-and-microbiomes.html.
While there is no shortage of information on the brutal treatment of pigs in the US’s industrial agriculture system, specifically in the confined animal feeding operations, for my money the most powerful and persuasive is Jonathan Safran Foer’s remarkable Eating Animals (Little, Brown, 2009). I have no doubt ruined scores of students’ Thanksgiving holidays after assigning the book during fall semester. After reading Foer’s work, it’s very hard not to agree with Michael Pollan’s reflection in his essay “An Animal’s Place” that future generations will look back on our treatment of these intelligent creatures in horror. (“Will history someday judge us as harshly as it judges the Germans who went about their ordinary lives in the shadow of Treblinka? Precisely that question was recently posed by J. M. Coetzee, the South African novelist, in a lecture delivered at Princeton; he answered it in the affirmative. If animal rightists are right, ‘a crime of stupefying proportions’ (in Coetzee’s words) is going on all around us every day, just beneath our notice.”)
Rowan Jacobsen’s fascinating book about terroir is American Terroir: Savoring the Flavors of Our Woods, Waters, and Fields (Bloomsbury, 2010).
In A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold wanted to show how nature sustains us. To do so, he chose the figure of a pyramid—and at the base he placed “soil.” By setting soil as the foundation of his “biotic pyramid,” Leopold attempted to demonstrate the simple fact that everything else—plants, insects, birds, mammals—depends upon soil for existence. “No ecologist before had presented such a comprehensive and comprehensible concept of the land and explained its implications for the broad range of conservation concerns,” says biographer Julianne Warren. “This new understanding placed on people a new obligation to conserve soil and all that went with it.”
Is soil the same as dirt? Clever headlines like “Are we treating our soil like dirt?” clearly make a distinction. But I have found that 1) most people use the words interchangeably and don’t consciously think there’s a difference, and 2) that soil scientists and conservationists use the word “soil.” My own sense is that while soil clearly refers to the living substance on which life depends, dirt can but often doesn’t. For example, when I dig my hands into a garden, that’s soil; when I drive by a construction site, that’s dirt. Another way to think of it is that soil is living dirt, and dirt is dead soil. In the end, I think “dirt” is useful as a broader term, because most people have an immediate image in mind. But soil is really what we’re talking about—the living ground.
Find out more about the Soil Society of America (and of course their favorite subject, soil) at https://www.soils.org. To learn more about soil profiles, see the “Planting Seeds” blog from the California Department of Food and Agriculture at http://plantingseedsblog.cdfa.ca.gov/wordpress/?p=7930.
A reading list for anyone interested in learning more about soil would certainly include the following books: Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery (University of California, 2007); Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth, by William Bryant Logan (Riverhead, 1995); Dirt: A Love Story, edited by Barbara Richardson (ForeEdge, 2015); Tales from the Underground: A Natural History of Subterranean Life, by David W. Wolfe (Basic, 2001); Life in the Soil, by James B. Nardi (University of Chicago, 2007); Cows Save the Planet: And other Improbable Ways of Restoring Soil to Heal the Earth, by Judith D. Schwartz (Chelsea Green, 2013); and The Soil Will Save Us: How Scientists, Farmers, and Foodies Are Healing the Soil to Save the Planet, by Kristin Ohlson (Rodale, 2014).
The figure that the world has on average only six more decades of growing crops comes from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization. To find out more, see “Only 60 Years of Farming Left If Soil Degradation Continues” from Scientific American at http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/only-60-years-of-farming-left-if-soil-degradation-continues/, and “We’re treating soil like dirt” from The Guardian’s George Monbiot at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/mar/25/treating-soil-like-dirt-fatal-mistake-human-life. To learn more about how “Europe’s environmental laws overlook vital soil,” see http://www.dw.com/en/global-ideas-soil-erosion-agriculture-europe/a-18807131.
For a sample of recent articles detailing good news about soil and farming, see “A Sustainable Solution for the Corn Belt” by Mark Bittman at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/19/opinion/a-sustainable-solution-for-the-corn-belt.html; “Healthy Ground, Healthy Atmosphere: Recarbonizing the Earth’s Soils” at http://ehp.niehs.nih.gov/124-a30/; “Cover Crops, a Farming Revolution with Deep Roots in the Past” at http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/business/cover-crops-a-farming-revolution-with-deep-roots-in-the-past.html; and “Agroecology and industrial farming: leveling the playing field” at https://foodfirst.org/agroecology-and-industrial-farming-leveling-the-playing-field/.
Joseph Wood Krutch is perhaps best known for his lovely book The Desert Year, published in 1952.
The statistics about Iowa’s transformation are stunning: “150 years ago, nearly 85% of the state was tall grass prairie,” explains the Iowa Natural Heritage Foundation, “today less than 0.1% of this prairie remains”; see http://www.inhf.org/ec1-prairie-management.cfm. The extension service of Iowa State University reports that more than 37 percent of the state is planted in corn, and more than 25 percent in (soy)beans. As of 2013 data, 91 percent of Iowa land consists of farms, leaving only approximately 9 percent to interstates, roads, surface water, incorporated land, or federal land; see http://www.extension.iastate.edu/soils/crop-and-land-use-statewide-data.
I spent a fascinating afternoon at the Tallgrass Prairie Center with its director, Laura Jackson. When I mentioned to her that some people I’d told about Iowa’s transformation couldn’t believe the news, she responded, “They need to drive through northern Iowa on a country road.” When she first did that herself, when she first came to northern Iowa more than twenty years ago, it struck her as a wasteland. “Oh my gosh, it’s just really extreme,” she said with a laugh. “There aren’t many places in the world that are like this. To be able to drive five hours east, five hours west, five hours north, and two hours south before you hit any expanse of natural lands at all—find another place on the map like that. It doesn’t exist.”
For Jackson, this monotony is no mistake. In her article “Who ‘designs’ the agricultural landscape?” she argues that Iowa has been systematically “designed primarily by global agribusiness corporations.” Local farmers and communities have little power to resist such design. And the one group that could resist—urban consumers—are seduced by what she calls “the myth of the farmer as designer” and “remain ignorant of the aesthetic, ecological, and social consequences of their own appetites.” Read more at http://lj.uwpress.org/content/27/1/23.refs.
To find out more about the Tallgrass Prairie Center and its efforts to preserve Iowa’s prairie biodiversity, visit www.tallgrassprairiecenter.org.
My thanks to Mark Rasmussen of the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. The challenge, he told me during my visit to his campus, is to get industrial agriculture to “quit fighting this defensive siege mentality, where they’re just circling the wagons, trying to hold everyone off,” rather than see that farming can’t continue the course it’s on.
For more on Fred Kirschenmann’s writings, see https://www.leopold.iastate.edu/content/writings-fred-kirschenmann.
As we left Marsden Farms and began thinking about dinner, Fred Kirschenmann told me about his current activities at the Stone Barns Center in upstate New York. “Part of the mission there is to educate children. We have about ten thousand kids come through there a year, and the staff always brings back stories. My favorite is a school bus came out with some eight-year-old kids one morning. The first thing our guide did was took them to the garden so they could see where food comes from. Then at one point she reached down, pulled a carrot out of the ground, washed it off, and handed it to the kids, and said, ‘Have a bite to see how great it tastes.’ And she said this one little boy looked her right in the eyes and said, ‘Oh, gross. Who stuck those in the dirt? Now we can’t eat them.’”
Find out more about the Stone Barns Center at www.stonebarnscenter.org and its famous chef, Dan Barber, at www.bluehillfarm.com.
For a fascinating discussion of the “true cost” of a cheeseburger, see Mark Bittman’s “The True Cost of a Burger” at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/opinion/the-true-cost-of-a-burger.html. The Story of Stuff Project has a good article on the concept of externalized costs at http://storyofstuff.org/blog/talk-about-externalized-costs/, an understanding of which is a requirement for anyone weighing the value of “the environment” compared to anything else.
There is so much happening with soil these days. On one hand, it seems most people know little about its value. On the other hand, the news is filled with stories about this value. Here are just a few recent headlines: “Human security at risk as depletion of soil accelerates, scientists warn”; “World loses trillions of dollars’ worth of nature’s benefits each year due to land degradation”; and “Earth has lost a third of arable land in past 40 years, scientists say.” For an excellent article detailing the many threats to life on Earth from a loss of soil, see “What If the World’s Soil Runs Out?” at http://world.time.com/2012/12/14/what-if-the-worlds-soil-runs-out/.
The most prominent research on the possible decline of nutrients in fruits and vegetables has been led by Donald R. Davis of the University of Texas. Find out more in “Declining Fruit and Vegetable Nutrient Composition: What is the Evidence?” http://hortsci.ashspublications.org/content/44/1/15.full.
Find Wendell Berry’s lecture in which he argues that “it all turns on affection” at http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture. He writes, “The word ‘affection’ and the terms of value that cluster around it—love, care, sympathy, mercy, forbearance, respect, reverence—have histories and meanings that raise the issue of worth. We should, as our culture has warned us over and over again, give our affection to things that are true, just, and beautiful. When we give affection to things that are destructive, we are wrong. A large machine in a large, toxic, eroded cornfield is not, properly speaking, an object or a sign of affection.”
Fireflies are increasingly endangered around the world, and nowhere more than here in the United States. Find out more at http://www.firefly.org/how-you-can-help.html.
For more on Walt Whitman’s “A child said, What is the grass?” see https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/child-said-what-grass.
Find Michael Pollan’s essay “Why Mow?” at http://michaelpollan.com/articles-archive/why-mow-the-case-against-lawns/. “Nowhere in the world are lawns as prized as in America,” he writes. And that “Lawns appear to cover more than three times the number of acres that irrigated corn covers” reports a NASA article, “Lawn Surface Area in the United States” at http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Lawn/lawn2.php. Perhaps the most important study on American lawns to date was conducted in 2003 by NASA’s Cristina Milesi, who used satellite data to determine how much lawn covered the country. A new study in 2014 focused on six American cities to determine Americans’ lawn-care habits and found that “79% of surveyed residents watered their lawns and 64% applied fertilizer”; see https://www.soils.org/discover-soils/story/national-study-reveals-urban-lawn-care-habits. “These numbers are important,” wrote Peter Groffman, one of the study’s authors, because “what we do in our suburban and urban yards has a big impact, for better or worse, on the environment.”
Find out more about Shay and Eric Lunseth, and organic lawn care in general, at http://www.organiclawnsbylunseth.com.
Details of how a CDC study found “pesticides in 100% of the people who had both blood and urine tested” can be found at http://learn.eartheasy.com/2009/01/lawn-care-chemicals-how-toxic-are-they/.
To find out more about Roundup Ready Kentucky bluegrass, see “Roundup Ready Kentucky Bluegrass: Benefits and Risks,” at http://turf.umn.edu/2014/04/roundup-ready-kentucky-bluegrass-benefits-risks/. Glyphosate, the main chemical used in Roundup, remains highly controversial. For a sample of the debate, see such articles as “World Health Organization’s new Q&A on Glyphosate Confirms Toxicity of Round Up” at http://www.globalresearch.ca/world-health-organizations-new-q-a-on-glyphosate-confirms-toxicity-of-round-up/5513497; “Experts call on feds to re-evaluate the world’s most heavily used herbicide” at http://www.environmentalhealthnews.org/ehs/news/2016/feb/glyphosate-roundup-monsanto-cancer-endocrine-disruptor-science; and “Misgivings about how a weed killer affects the soil” at http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/business/misgivings-about-how-a-weed-killer-affects-the-soil.html.
Perhaps the best-known negative effect of Roundup and glyphosate is the devastation scientists say it has caused to the world’s monarch butterfly population. For more, see “Limits sought on weed killer glyphosate to help monarch butterflies” at http://articles.latimes.com/2014/feb/25/science/la-sci-sn-monarch-butterfly-roundup-20140224, and https://www.nrdc.org/experts/sylvia-fallon/monarch-butterflies-plummet-its-time-rethink-widespread-use-our-nations-top. But around the world, insect populations in general have seen an enormous decline in their numbers, mostly due to habitat loss and climate disruption. A wonderful source for learning more is “Vanishing Act: Why Insects Are Declining and Why It Matters,” from Yale Environment 360. The average of a 45 percent decline in insect populations over the past thirty-five years boggles the mind.
When I asked Janet Davis of Charlottesville, Virginia’s Hill House Farm and Nursery about the value of lawns for pollinating insects, she laughed. “Virtually none,” she said. “What we need is grass that has space between the clumps, and we make it so thick it’s like a putting green. A lot of our insects and a lot of our important pollinators are ground nesting, and they need a little bit of bare dirt. If they can’t get to that, they’re gone. Most of them only fly a hundred yards or less, and they only live a short period of time. So they can’t have big expanses of lawn. There’s nothing to eat. They’re rapidly disappearing because of our obsession.”
This summer, in the back yard of the house I’m renting in Minneapolis, there is clearly a bumblebee nest between clumps of turfgrass. I watch the big bees coming in to land, maneuvering like tiny yellow-black cargo helicopters swaying in the breeze as they settle down between the green blades of grass. I am quite certain that I have never before noticed bumblebees nesting on the ground. And I am amazed.
Type “environmental costs of golf courses” into any web browser and no shortage of articles will arrive. Among them, “America’s 18,000 Golf Courses Are Devastating the Environment,” which though somewhat dated (2004) still wins the day for most alarming headline. A more recent article, “Health of ecosystems on U.S. golf courses better than predicted, researchers find,” at https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/04/140410122201.htm, reflects a growing consensus that perhaps golf courses are not quite so bad as is commonly thought.
The Wes Jackson book I quote is Becoming Native to This Place (University Press of Kentucky, 2004). But he is also the author of several other important books, as well as the founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. The Land Institute works “to ensure food security by replacing the current extractive and chemically intensive model for agriculture with a sustainable model inspired by nature.” Find out more at landinstitute.org.
Peter Matthiessen is the author of several wonderful books about the natural world (as well as several wonderful novels). They include The Birds of Heaven (from which this chapter’s epigraph comes), The Tree Where Man Was Born (about East Africa’s Serengeti), and The Snow Leopard, which won the National Book Award in 1979.
The study detailing the deteriorating state of Minnesota’s wetlands can be found at https://www.pca.state.mn.us/research-shows-minnesota-wetlands-healthy-overall-suffering-some-regions-2015-october. In general, despite efforts to protect them, wetlands continue to decline in quality and number. The EPA reports, “Despite all the benefits provided by wetlands, the United States loses about 60,000 acres of wetlands each year.” Most of the laws to protect wetlands have come since 1984, when Congress realized that more than half of US wetlands had already been drained or filled for development.
All the quotes reflecting the beauty of the tallgrass prairie can be found in The Tallgrass Prairie Reader, edited by John T. Price (University of Iowa, 2014). This is a beautiful book full of firsthand accounts of what was once a magnificent ecosystem.
The threats to the remaining native grasslands continue, and in recent years have increased. “The Enormous Threat to America’s Last Grassland” reads the Washington Post headline (June 16, 2016). The subtitle to another article reads, “Across the northern plains, native grassland is being turned into farmland at a rate not seen since the 1920s. The environmental consequences could be disastrous”; see http://prospect.org/article/plowed-under. These are the grasslands upon which ducks, cranes, and other birds directly rely. Incredibly, reports the Prospect.org article, “the rates of land-use change in the region… parallel the deforestations taking place in Brazil, Malaysia, and Indonesia.”
For an excellent article on the sandhill crane migration passing through Nebraska’s Platte River, see Alex Shoumatoff’s “500,000 Cranes Are Headed for Nebraska in One of Earth’s Greatest Migrations,” from Smithsonian magazine. To find out more about the Nicholson Audubon Center at Rowe Sanctuary, visit http://rowe.audubon.org. Even better, go in person between March and early April to see for yourself one of nature’s most breathtaking scenes.
Another excellent article, though on “Great Migrations” in general, appeared in National Geographic: “Great Migrations: Birds, butterflies, and beasts take off. Humans interfere,” by David Quammen, November 2010.
The quote from Linda Hogan comes from her book Dwellings: A Spiritual History of the Living World (Norton, 1995).
About the ability of sandhill cranes to survive serious weather, Gary Krapu told me, “They’ve evolved so that they can migrate long distances with a minimum of energy being expended riding wind uplifts, and they don’t make many mistakes. Sometimes when crossing the Bering Strait into Russia, if there’s fog and cold rain, they can lose their orientation and go into the waves, and you’ll get drifts of dead cranes coming onto the shoreline.”
But the place that concerns Krapu most is the Platte River, “because they are there in huge numbers and it’s at a time of the year that you can get real severe ice storms and blizzards. I’ve been out in blizzards where you can hardly see, and they’ll have their head under their wing, and you wouldn’t hardly know there was a bird out there—you’ll see bumps on the landscape.” The cranes can usually survive that type of weather, he says, but if snowstorms turn into ice storms, and the ice starts sticking to their feathers, that’s another story. “That doesn’t occur very often, but when you have a situation like the Platte where you have 80 percent of the population in one spot, a half million cranes, nature generally did not plan for that.”
For more about cranes, visit the International Crane Foundation in Baraboo, Wisconsin, or online at www.savingcranes.org.
Find out more about impacts to the US National Wildlife Refuge System in “Housing development will limit the ability of the National Wildlife Refuge System to respond to climate change at http://conservationcorridor.org/2016/07/housing-development-will-limit-the-ability-of-the-national-wildlife-refuge-system-to-respond-to-climate-change/. For similar information about development around national parks, see http://www.nationalparkstraveler.com/2012/04/study-development-around-national-parks-far-surpasses-other-parts-country9678. And for an excellent article on similar situations around the world, see “How Nations are Chipping Away at Their Protected Lands” at http://e360.yale.edu/feature/how_nations_are_chipping_away_their_protected_lands/2989/.
Aldo Leopold’s “Thinking Like a Mountain” appears in A Sand County Almanac (Oxford, 1948).
An earlier version of this chapter appeared in Fracture: Essays, Poems, and Stories on Fracking in America, edited by Taylor Brorby and Stefanie Brook Trout (Ice Cube, 2016).
Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us was originally published in 1951. A national best-seller, it won the John Burroughs Award for Nature Writing in 1952. Its success and the success of her other books such as Under the Sea-Wind (1941) and The Edge of the Sea (1955) created the space for the book for which she is today best known, Silent Spring (1962).
Curiously enough, “Hydrofracking 101” has now disappeared from the Halliburton website.
For more information on the destruction caused to ground by fracking, see “Thirty Thousand Square Kilometers of Land Lost to Oil and Gas Development” at http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/04/thirty-thousand-square-kilometers-land-lost-oil-and-gas-development, and “New research on cumulative ecological impact of oil and gas” at https://www.hcn.org/articles/researchers-calculate-cumulative-ecological-impact-of-oil-and-gas-boom-and-its-big).
You don’t need to know how to spell “Hieronymus” to search for the Dutch painter of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries—just begin typing “H-i-e-r-o” and your search engine will probably know what you mean. Housed at the Prado Museum in Madrid, Spain, The Garden of Earthly Delights is perhaps his most famous work. To learn more (and see images of his works), see http://www.hieronymus-bosch.org/the-complete-works.html.
William Styron shares his harrowing personal story of clinical depression in Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, published in 1992. The book is, perhaps counterintuitively, a beautifully written account of a descent into hell.
Cormac McCarthy’s The Road won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2007. Not long after its publication, the British journalist George Monbiot wrote, “A few weeks ago I read what I believe is the most important environmental book ever written. It is not Silent Spring, Small is Beautiful or even Walden.” He was talking about The Road.
For an excellent summary of how pumping toxic liquid from drilling operations back into the ground poses possible risks to drinking water, see Abrahm Lustgarten, “Injection Wells: The Poison Beneath Us” at https://www.propublica.org/article/injection-wells-the-poison-beneath-us.
Groundwater is, yes, water in the ground. But more specifically it’s water found in the tiny spaces between soil and rock. Larger openings underground—think caves and caverns, or the remains of lakes under Mexican capitals—that are filled with groundwater are known as aquifers. In most cases, water drawn from underground aquifers and sprayed onto crops or lawns, or drawn from drinking taps, or allowed to run down streets on hot summer days, is water that has been underground for centuries. The fact that this resource lies hidden below us creates a challenge. For example, while research does agree that the Ogallala Aquifer has been lowered significantly by decades of use, it does not agree on how much the aquifer still holds or when it will run dry. Because so much of Central Plains agriculture depends on the Ogallala for its water, how much is left matters a great deal. And that’s only one major aquifer—around the world other major aquifers have also been drawn down to the point where experts now fear they will soon be exhausted.
Scientists using NASA satellites have found that fully twenty-one of Earth’s thirty-five largest aquifers had “passed their sustainability tipping points, meaning more was removed than replaced during the decade-long study period.” The study was the first to show definitively how the globe’s aquifers are struggling to keep up with the demands from human activities such as mining and agriculture, and Earth’s ever-growing human population. Jay Famiglietti of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California put it succinctly: “The situation is quite critical. The water table is dropping all over the world. There’s not an infinite supply of water.”
Here in the United States, in addition to that of the Ogallala Aquifer, the most disconcerting groundwater losses are taking place as a result of increasing human populations in places such as Nevada, Utah, and Colorado, and in the agriculture-intensive Central Valley in California. For decades, energy and mining companies have used aquifers as dumping grounds, polluting what are often pristine water sources beyond the capacity for renewal. The oil and gas industry is by far the biggest user of underground aquifers and by far the biggest polluter. But, said a senior EPA official, “right now nobody—nobody—wants to interfere with the development of oil and gas or uranium. The political pressure is huge not to slow that down.”
Perhaps best known for her book Living Downstream (1997), the story of linking her bladder cancer with the industrial chemicals flowing from a factory upstream, Sandra Steingraber has now turned her considerable talents toward the issue of fracking. “I have come to believe that extracting natural gas from shale using the newish technique called hydrofracking is the environmental issue of our time,” she wrote. “And I think you should, too.” Read more at “The Whole Fracking Enchilada” at https://orionmagazine.org/article/the-whole-fracking-enchilada/. I often tell students and friends that Steingraber’s Having Faith (2001)—her story of becoming pregnant for the first time at age thirty-eight while studying the effects of toxins in the environment—was the most powerful book I read while in graduate school.
The Collapse of Western Civilization: A View from the Future (2014) is Naomi Oreskes’s second book with Erik M. Conway. Their first book together, Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, was published in 2010. A talented speaker and writer on the subject of climate change, Oreskes is a professor of the History of Science at Harvard University. For more information, including links to her writings and interviews, visit http://histsci.fas.harvard.edu/people/naomi-oreskes.
John Clare lived from 1793 to 1864, spending nearly his entire life close to his childhood home of Helpston, England. Geoffrey Summerfield’s enlightening introduction to Clare’s poetry appears in John Clare: Selected Poems (Penguin, 2004). For an excellent discussion of Clare’s poetic significance, see Gary Harrison’s essay “John Clare’s Poetics of Acknowledgement” at http://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/rom.2012.0063?journalCode=rom. For Harrison, Clare’s poetry dissolves the dualism that so commonly underlies the Western approach to nature. Clare’s “astonishing love for Helpston and its environs,” his “habits of close observation and precise detail,” and use of “sensuous immediacy” to describe the natural world all add up to “his propensity to act and speak in its behalf.” Harrison describes “our refusal to acknowledge the bond we hold with the earth,” and argues that “it is not that we lack knowledge about environmental ills, but that we fail to acknowledge and act upon that knowledge.” In other words, “We fail to acknowledge nature and our responsibility to… see it, acknowledge it in all its otherness and mystery, and try to help others to do the same.”
The chapter’s epigraph comes from The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, by David George Haskell (Penguin, 2012).
Before reading Jean-François Steiner’s Treblinka, about the prisoner uprising that finally brought an end to the Nazi death camp, I knew of the camp only generally. By the time I had finished Steiner’s story, I knew I had to see this place for myself. Reading Vasily Grossman’s The Hell of Treblinka, originally published in 1944, further solidified my desire. My first goal was simply to see what it felt like to walk the grounds where something so horrible had taken place.
My deep thanks to Shiri Sandler of the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Even before the extermination camps were created at Treblinka, Bełżec, and Sobibór, she told me, the Einsatzgruppen (German for “task forces” or “deployment groups”), mobile killing squads, killed about 1.5 million people. “And so in the areas around these camps,” she described, “you already have people being gathered together and taken to fields outside their village and being shot.” Of Treblinka she said, “there were actually two camps at Treblinka, a work camp where many died, and an extermination camp where everyone died.”
“My second name is Beth,” she told me, “in honor of my German great-grandfather who was a German Jewish veteran of World War One, a decorated veteran. And my whole childhood my middle name was used, I was Shiri-Beth, for Benjamin. We have a picture of him in his uniform, with his medals. He was killed on Christmas 1944, shot in a subcamp of Dachau. Survivors of the camp, I’ve talked to one of them, have said a group of men were shot as a Christmas present to Hitler.”
Sandler tells me of a photograph at Birkenau that stays with her. It’s of a woman in one of the Hungarian deportation pictures that you see on one of the plaques there. “She was probably beautiful, she has dark hair and is wearing it down, and she’s wearing what looks like a cape. And she looks ravaged—she looks thin and she’s drawn and she’s haunting. And she’s just waiting,” Sandler explains. “In those pictures they’re just sitting in the woods waiting for their turn in the gas chambers.”
I think of Sandler telling me about her anger at the language used at some German memorials, “trying to retroactively give agency or humanity.” Of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe she told me, “I was there with my husband, and he was like, ‘Is this clear enough for you, the language? Or do you need it to be’—and this is his black humor—‘the Memorial to the Murdered, Gassed, Beaten, Starved, Raped, and otherwise Destroyed Jews of Europe?’ And I was like, ‘Well, that would be better, but unwieldy. This is okay. ‘Murdered’ is so clear.’”
When I travel for research, I carry my digital recorder wherever I go, mostly to record other voices but sometimes to record my thoughts, knowing that I will listen later, when writing. But the recordings I make at Treblinka are a few questions at first to Josef, and then only the sound of me, alone, walking on this ground, at this site, with long spaces of no words, of—I don’t want to say silence, because I can hear the wind and the scattered songbirds, and my feet on the gravel and grass. But no words. And finally I turned the recorder off, because I had all the wind and pine trees and birdsong I could use, and it felt impossible to speak.
At Treblinka, at the edge of the forest clearing, a series of black-and-white photographs have been blown up to poster size, the first of an enormous steam shovel on tank tracks with the gas chambers in the background. Beneath the photo the caption reads, “The presented pictures were taken by Kurt Franz, the deputy commandant of the death camp in Treblinka. They come from the album called ‘Beautiful Times.’”
The one individual name on a jagged stone marker at Treblinka belongs to Janusz Korczak. For many years he worked as the director of a Jewish orphanage in Warsaw. The story of his refusal of several opportunities to abandon his orphans and escape their fate—and of his leading the column of nearly two hundred children dressed in their finest clothes to the cattle cars—is heartbreaking. He died with his orphans at Treblinka in August 1942.
For an excellent documentary on Caroline Sturdy Colls and her work at Treblinka, see “Treblinka: Hitler’s Killing Machine” by the Smithsonian Channel at http://www.smithsonianchannel.com/shows/treblinka-hitlers-killing-machine/0/3403868.
Along with Ivar Schute, two other archeologists were involved in the work at Sobibór: Wojciech Mazurek (Poland) and Yoram Haimi (Israel). When I asked Schute how he and his fellow archeologists at Sobibór could be sure they had found the gas chamber remains, he told me, “The spatial structure of the site makes it clear. From the ramp a wooden fenced corridor of about two hundred meters, which we found, leads to a camp-within-a-camp, which consists mainly of mass graves, which we found. The connection between the corridor known, as at Treblinka, as the Himmelfahrt Strasse should be the gas chamber complex. And that is exactly where we found the brick building.”
In talking with Schute, I was reminded of the incredible toll inflicted on Dutch Jews during the Holocaust. If ever we in the West need a reminder that, as Shiri Sandler told me, “it was exactly what it would feel like for us,” looking at the photos of these Dutch citizens dressed in their best clothes boarding cattle cars ought to do the trick. For me, the people being sent to the extermination camps look exactly like my grandparents in 1940s southern Minnesota.
While the story of Anne Frank is known around the world, many fewer of us know that in total, more than 56,500 Dutch Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where only about 1,000 survived. More than 34,000 Dutch Jews were sent to Sobibór, where fewer than 20 survived. In total, of the more than 107,000 Dutch Jews deported, at least 102,000 perished. When you’re in Amsterdam, the National Holocaust Museum and the Jewish Historical Museum are not to be missed.
A few more facts about Alaska: the largest state in the Union, it is larger than Texas, California, and Montana (numbers 2, 3, and 4) combined; Alaska has more than 50 percent of the US coastline; and only 20 percent of the state’s roads are paved, compared to an average of 91 percent in the other forty-nine states.
Find out about the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta at www.fws.gov/refuge/yukon_delta. Or, better yet, go see it for yourself: the flight from Anchorage to Bethel takes between 75 and 105 minutes, and Alaska Airlines has six flights daily. Driving there isn’t an option.
For an excellent article on the future of the Yup’ik people, see “Baked Alaska: A Snowless Climate Threatens the Survival of the Yupik People of Togiak,” at http://www.newsweek.com/2015/06/12/togiak-alaska-lacks-snow-338600.html.
For more on Woods Hole Research Center and its work on climate change, especially thawing permafrost, visit www.whrc.org. Listen to Dr. Susan Natali discuss thawing Alaskan permafrost on the radio program Living on Earth at http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.html?programID=15-P13-00024&segmentID=1. And if you’re interested in going straight to the scientific report, see “Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback,” in Nature 520 (April 9, 2015): 171–179. For the Woods Hole basic primer on the issue, see http://whrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/PB_Permafrost.pdf). Among the implications listed: “Carbon emissions from thawing permafrost accelerate climate warming, so the potential exists for a catastrophic, self-reinforcing cycle of warming and thawing permafrost.”
I thank Norman Wirzba for a wonderful long conversation about soil and the sacred. Find out more about him at https://divinity.duke.edu/faculty/norman-wirzba. “The biblical story is telling us that the fate of soil and humanity are inextricably intertwined,” he writes in “Dramas of Love and Dirt: Soil and the Salvation of the World.” When soil suffers, he says, “so do we.”
I first read the phrase “intimate to the degree of being sacred” in Sandra Steingraber’s Having Faith: An Ecologist’s Journey to Motherhood (2001). She was talking about breastfeeding.
Read more from Joanna Eede in her National Geographic blog http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2011/04/01/uncontacted-tribes-the-last-free-people-on-earth/. The photographs are amazing too.
At only fifty-eight pages, Barry Lopez’s brilliant The Rediscovery of North America (Vintage, 1992) is a quick and powerful read. Part of the power comes from his subject, but it is Lopez’s clear and thoughtful language that makes his argument resonate.
Learn more about Kathleen Dean Moore at www.riverwalking.com. I first met Kathy while at school in Nevada. She had come over from Corvallis to visit our Literature and Environment program at the university. I was immediately taken by her thoughtful, serious, joyous approach to our world’s environmental problems. When I first had the idea for my anthology on light pollution, the University of Nevada Press said, Find a few writers willing to contribute and then we’ll talk contract. I immediately thought of Kathleen Dean Moore, and when she said yes to my invitation and sent me the beautiful “The Gifts of Darkness,” I knew I would soon have my anthology. I am lucky to call her a friend, and I hold her in great admiration for the work she is doing to raise awareness about the urgent need to address climate change.
You can find out more about Dr. Miles Silman at http://college.wfu.edu/biology/people/faculty/silman/, and in Elizabeth Kolbert’s best-selling book The Sixth Extinction, in which he’s featured.
For a good discussion of the most recent UN projections on human population growth, see “Global population set to hit 9.7 billion people by 2050 despite fall in fertility,” in The Guardian (July 29, 2015).
For more information on Wayne Roosa, including images of his artwork, visit www.wayneroosa.com. Learn more about the exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Art titled Sacred by visiting http://new.artsmia.org/sacred/. And find out more about the artist Francis Alys at www.francisalys.com.
And “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground,” reads Genesis 2:7. And “out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food,” Genesis 2:9. That “dust to dust” idea is one we repeat, but here it’s really from ground to ground, as in, “until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken,” Genesis 3:19. I say this because, of all that has become clear to me about our relationship with the ground, this is no doubt true: ground is home, and heaven too.
Luna showed me this one evening in the North Carolina woods. We had moved to Winston-Salem and I’d found us a county park to walk and run in, the two of us alone. And on this day we were running, the autumn humidity covering my shirtless body in sweat. We began the last descending trail winding through the woods, Luna about ten feet in front of me, leading the way, her orange-and-white ears flaring now and then as she galloped along the trail. We both were still young enough and strong enough to be running through the woods, and now on the downward slope toward the tail end of the run, I thought, This is heaven. This. Here. Now.