CHAPTER 2
A New South Reckoning
A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.
—Edward Abbey, The Journey Home: Some Words in Defense of the American West
Louisville, Kentucky — On September 1, 1867, John Muir took the Jeffersonville, Madison, and Indianapolis railroad to the banks of the Ohio River. He crossed into Kentucky the next morning and into the “the big social establishment of Louisville.” It was a bustling city of one hundred thousand people under the military rule of Union troops. And so began Muir’s “thousand-mile walk.” Although it wasn’t really a thousand miles—more like nine hundred, with a hundred-mile boat ride. No matter. The great adventure had begun.
He wouldn’t tarry in Louisville. He disliked cities of any size. Besides, Muir had a near-messianic desire to commune with nature. “I steered through the big city by compass without speaking a word to any one,” he wrote. “My plan was simply to push on in a general southward direction by the wildest, leafiest, and least trodden way I could find, promising the greatest extent of virgin forest.”
Muir sported a bushy beard with longish brown hair tucked beneath a flat-brimmed hat. He wore sturdy shoes, gray trousers, a jacket, and a shirt with money concealed in a hidden pocket. A black, rubberized backpack contained a change of underwear, soap, towel, comb, and brush. There were books: a collection of Robert Burns’s poems; Paradise Lost by John Milton; a whopping five-pound New Testament; and a botanical text by Alphonso Wood. He also carried a homemade plant press—a contraption of wire-gauze sheets, leather straps, buckles, and blotting paper—for drying the leaves, flowers, and grasses he intended to pick and ship home. A small, leather-bound notebook with lined pages would serve as a journal. On the inside flap, the twenty-nine-year-old adventurer wrote: “John Muir, Earth-planet, Universe.” It was encircled and underlined.
The man with an ambivalence towards nationality, and, for that matter, questions about his own identity, “was setting out in a joyful mood of freedom,” writes biographer Donald Worster.
And why not? He was young, White, single, freed from a factory job, and recuperated from serious injury. An overbearing father and strict religious upbringing lay five hundred miles away in Wisconsin. A pleasant jaunt (or so he thought) through verdant forests and rolling hills beckoned. “He felt driven to lead the life of an outlaw toward society,” says Worster.
And the South would be his frontier, a New World in which to discover himself. Eventually, millions of people from the North and Midwest would follow Muir to the Southern promised land of economic opportunity and temperate climes. In that sense Muir was a true pioneer.
He was also largely clueless about the South. “This will be a journey I know very little about,” Muir confided to Jeanne Carr.
The South was hot, semi-tropical, and malaria-ridden. Its people were largely poor, uneducated, and struggling to recover from the Civil War. General Sherman and colleagues had laid waste to the South’s cities, factories, and railroads. Nearly three hundred thousand Southerners had died in the Lost Cause—including one of every four White men between the ages of twenty and twenty-four. One-third of the region’s population were newly freed slaves with a tenuous hold on what de Tocqueville considered America’s “exceptional” democracy.
James B. Hunt, who chronicles Muir’s trek in Restless Fires, writes that “Muir was ill-prepared for the rigors of the walk.” He considered it merely a warm-up for his true ambulatory adventure—South America. “Had he fully known the practical obstacles to his health, his personal safety, and his physical well-being,” notes Hunt, “one wonders whether he would have made the journey at all.”
Muir, though, like the war-torn South itself, eventually made it. He survived run-ins with desperadoes, hunger, fatigue, malaria, and self-doubt to reach the Gulf Coast of Florida. The region he left behind, though, took longer to find its footing.
The farm and the forest fueled the South’s rebirth. By 1880, Georgia produced a record six million bales of cotton. Hardwoods from the Appalachians, and softwoods from the coastal plains, built the cities from New York to New Orleans. Northern carpetbaggers and Southern boosters, including Henry Grady, the editor of the Atlanta Constitution, and Booker T. Washington, the African American educator, extolled the region’s cheap labor, abundant natural resources, and pliant elected officials. The southern Piedmont soon eclipsed both New England and old England as textile capital of the world. The power companies dammed the region’s rivers to provide electricity to the mills and factories that turned the South into a manufacturing powerhouse. New Yorker Willis Carrier made the summertime South tolerable with the invention of air conditioning. The precursor to the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta eradicated the malarial scourge by swabbing five million homes with DDT.
The two World Wars proved both boon and burden to a region that witnessed incredible economic growth while losing tens of thousands of men overseas. The Great Depression, boll weevil, and shoddy farming methods crippled the cotton industry. Jim Crow and the KKK sent six million Blacks northward.
The twin evils of war and depression, though, created a dependency on the federal government that sustains the region’s economy to this day. Powerful politicians brought billions of dollars in public works projects—the Tennessee Valley Authority, Savannah River Site, highways, bridges, drained swamps, straightened rivers—and military bases to the South. Local officials lavished free land and tax breaks on any domestic or foreign corporation looking for low-wage workers and lax environmental rules. Southern governors shared Dwight D. Eisenhower’s belief that economic growth required ribbons of asphalt stretching from coast to coast. Auto-mobility brought hordes of Northerners and Midwesterners to the South for vacation, employment, retirement, or reinvention.
Transportation, as much as cheap land and labor, made the modern South. Louisville is a prime example of the power of propulsion, whether it’s a horse treading the bluegrass, a riverboat plying the mighty Ohio, or an SUV rolling off an assembly line. The River City (or Derby City, Falls City, Gateway to the South) owes much of its existence to the Falls of the Ohio, where the river drops twenty-four feet over limestone ledges. Riverboats discharged passengers and cargo above the falls and gathered them up again two miles downriver before continuing on to the “Mighty Mississippi” and points south and west. Meriwether Lewis met William Clark here in 1803 before their historic expedition to the Pacific Ocean. Flat-bottomed boats have run the two rivers from Pittsburgh to New Orleans for two hundred years.
Central Kentucky has always been horsey country, its wholesome grasses and permissiveness toward gambling fueling a billion-dollar industry as well as Louisville’s Kentucky Derby identity. Three interstate highways meet in Louisville, putting two-thirds of the country’s consumers within a day’s drive. Ford builds SUVs at one factory in Louisville, trucks at another. CSX, Norfolk Southern, and Canadian Pacific run trains through town. UPS operates an air force from Louisville that ships packages to more than two hundred countries.
The city more than doubled its population in the last two decades (thanks largely to a merger with Jefferson County), adding a whopping 350,000 residents. (Only two other cities, Elk Grove, California, and McKinney, Texas, grew proportionately faster.) Still, Greater Louisville carries the dubious distinction of having the most exurban—fast-growing, semi-rural, less-populated—counties in the nation. Thirteen of them, according to the Brookings Institution. Not Los Angeles. Not Atlanta. Little ole’ Louisville. And one of those counties, Crawford, across the river in Indiana, is further distinguished by having the country’s highest percentage of commuters who leave for work before six in the morning. The metropolitan region, overall, also has the highest percentage of people—83 percent—who commute by themselves. These people like their cars.
Louisville, of course, isn’t the biggest or fastest-growing Southern city. It ranks as only the twenty-ninth largest in the United States. But, as the first Southern stop along a Midwesterner’s journey, Louisville offers the traveler a preview of the region’s growth and popularity.
Six of the top ten fastest-growing states—Texas, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, South Carolina—are in the South. Nearly 40 percent of the country lives here.
The South’s gain is the North’s, and the Midwest’s, pain. Georgia, for example, is the nation’s eighth most populous state, with eleven million residents. The Peach State, as well as North Carolina, leapfrogged Michigan in population the last decade. Florida surpassed New York in 2014. Only California and Texas tally more residents than the Sunshine State’s twenty-two million. Only Texas grows faster. Florida adds nine hundred people every day.
And it’s only going to get better. Or worse, depending on your perspective. The South, overall, grows 40 percent faster than the rest of the country. Or, looked at another way, there were only five million people living in the five states that Muir crossed in 1867. Today, fifty-five million live here. And just about every one of them owns a car or a pickup. The car is king, and without one, or two, or three vehicles, the Southern family doesn’t move. Cars beget highways which beget suburbs which beget sprawl which beget a host of environmental ills. A generation ago, metro Atlanta chopped down fifty acres of tree canopy every day. Florida, today, loses ten acres of natural land to development each hour. Edward Abbey, the author, critic, iconoclast, and stalwart defender of Western lands, labeled sprawl the “iron glacier.” (As an aside: I once had a managing editor who forbade me from using the word sprawl, fearing that our dwindling number of readers who lived twenty miles from Atlanta’s downtown core would find the term pejorative and, thereby, cancel their subscriptions. I tried to sneak it past copy editors every chance I got. Abbey would’ve approved.)
My eyes popped out when I read a 2014 article in the scientific journal PLOS ONE. “The Southern Megalopolis: Using the Past to Predict the Future of Urban Sprawl in the Southeast U.S.” is the rare academic report—well-researched, quite readable, and scary as hell. It’s written by a bunch of ecologists and biologists at the US Geological Survey and North Carolina State University and focuses on the nine southeastern states (not Texas) sandwiched between the Atlantic and the Gulf. It’s the world of multicar families who live in ever-more-distant suburban or exurban enclaves behind gates and along cul-de-sacs. Four-, six-, and even eight-lane highways connect one urban node to the next with a mess of office parks, warehouses, gas stations, storage units, and Piggly Wigglys in between.
The report paints a particularly frightening picture of the Piedmont region, stretching from Raleigh through Charlotte to Atlanta, with the overall urban footprint nearly tripling in size by 2060. Why? Because of the lure of the New South boomtowns, the car-friendly culture, and the proximity to the mountains and seas. The so-called Piedmont Megaregion would become an uninterrupted, four-hundred-mile ribbon of concrete with Interstate 85 as its spine. Metro Atlanta alone would stretch from Alabama to South Carolina. In 2014, about 7 percent of the Southeast was covered in concrete. By 2060, 18 percent will be. A map of the futuristic landscape accompanies the report. On it, Atlanta looks like an angry fever blister anchoring the southwestern end of the corridor with smaller, yet equally angry red and yellow splotches (Greenville, Charlotte, Greensboro, Durham, Raleigh) running to the northeast. The editors fail to credit Hieronymus Bosch for the map.
The man in the corner of the coffee shop stares at me as I walk in. He looks familiar in a crazy-uncle kind of way. Bushy white eyebrows. Red suspenders. Round, wire-rimmed glasses. A tam-o’-shanter with red pompom atop his head.
I move closer.
“John Muir, I presume?”
He nods.
There’s only one thing missing.
“Where’s the beard?”
“I used a fake beard.”
John Muir is, actually, Dick Shore, the South’s most famous Muir impersonator or, as Dick prefers, interpreter. I stopped in Lexington on my way to Louisville to meet Dick. What better way to get in the true Muir spirit than by talking with a guy who’s been channeling the Scottish naturalist for thirty years?
Dick fully embraces the Muir persona, affecting a brogue and regaling audiences in Kentucky, California, New Zealand, and beyond with poignant tales of the wayfarer’s life and lessons. More than thirty thousand people have witnessed Dick’s performances.
I found him via the Kentucky chapter of the Sierra Club.
“Yes, I am the resident Kentucky Muir Expert,” Dick promptly e-mailed back.
We arranged to meet at the Chocolate Holler coffee shop in downtown Lexington. It was soon evident that he relishes the opportunity to talk Muir with a fellow aficionado. The actor, after all, craves the limelight. But Dick also wants to share the wisdom of Muir and why his environmental philosophy, and ecological ethos, are especially relevant today.
“Muir confronted the same forces we confront today—the fools who think they can ‘dollarize’ everything in nature, like the logging, mining, and energy industries in particular,” Dick says. “But there was also a gentleness and sense of kinship with nature and wild creatures which we would do well to copy. People seek a hero and a champion, which is why they seek Muir.”
Dick, eighty-one, grew up in Bakersfield, California, and as a boy camped in Muir’s beloved Sierra Nevada. He graduated from the College (now University) of the Pacific, which today houses the largest collection of Muir-abilia—letters, journals, sketches—in the world. He got a PhD from Duke (zoology) and an MBA from the University of Toledo, and “somehow along the way,” he says, “I picked up a very strong ecological ethic.” A career as an industrial engineer ended in 1999. He’s been a Sierra Club life member for thirty years.
Dick learned of Muir’s Southern journey during a visit to the library in Elizabethtown, Kentucky, a town Muir passed through. He married his love of the eco-prophet and of the outdoors (teaching classes on edible plants, for example) with a latent thespian urge, to craft a distinctive Muir. An after-dinner performance at an Elderhostel gathering near Fort Knox kick-started his career.
“The world was in bad shape, with plagues here, droughts there, and people dying everywhere. It was a grim picture,” Dick tells me before draining his tea. “People needed to hear a hopeful story. They needed to hear Muir. Those of us who have heard or read Muir have the opportunity, perhaps the obligation, to make sure his words were not spoken in vain.”
The raconteur can’t decide on his favorite Muir tale. Bonaventure Cemetery? The mutt Stickeen? Muir’s escapades as a lad in Scotland? His first “interview” with a bear in the High Sierra? “It’s a little like asking somebody who their favorite child is,” says Dick, who wrapped up his Muir career in 2017. “It’s really difficult to choose. The Thousand-Mile Walk has so many lovely stories that help us see our kinship with the rest of creation: the rocks and the streams; the flowers and the trees; the bears and the bees; all these wee creatures; the least ones, our brothers and sisters.”
I listen, enthralled, for two hours. But I want to reach Louisville by nightfall. Dick, too, is fading. He hops on his bicycle, tam-o’-shanter firmly in place, and pedals off. But not before answering one last question.
“Muir might recognize some of these Southern places, outside the cities, the oldest portions of Bonaventure Cemetery, perhaps a few places in Kentucky that have remained off the well-beaten path,” Dick surmises. “But he would object vigorously to the worship of growth. He would be alarmed at the massive urbanization and investment in roads and highways paved with concrete, tar, and gravel. I think he would assert that sometimes more is not better.”
It’s gray and cold, twenty-seven degrees, as I eyeball Louisville from the Indiana side of the Ohio River. An early winter storm threatens the South. Few are foolish enough to brave these harsh conditions on a Saturday morning in January. But I, unlike Muir, don’t have the luxury of waiting for gentler weather.
After leaving Dick I hustled to Louisville, eager to get an early-morning start on Muir’s Southern trek. Construction and Friday afternoon traffic turned the one-hour drive into two. I stayed at a crummy motel in Jeffersonville and tried to block out the whir of Interstate traffic.
I, unlike Muir, can walk across the river on a bridge. The Big Four railroad trestle, with soaring steel trusses softened by the tinkling of piped-in classical music, reopened to walkers, joggers, and bikers in 2013. Jeffersonville fashioned a lovely park on its side of the river, complete with brew pub and pavilion. A sign touts a Tree Walk through town where seventy different species of native and nonnative trees—including a dozen of Muir’s favored oaks—can be found and appreciated. John James Audubon ran a general store nearby and sketched swallows, woodpeckers, buntings, and hawks along the Ohio in the early 1800s.
I step onto the bridge. My Muir journey begins. But I don’t feel anything in particular, no adrenaline rush of expectation or groundswell of emotion that a momentous undertaking is finally under way. Mostly, I feel cold. The wind rushing through the river valley cuts through my fleece pullovers. An occasional jogger lumbers past dutifully offering a “Good Morning” accompanied by a cloud of steam. My fingers grow numb as I take notes.
I cross the half-mile bridge quickly, observe the tangle of Louisville’s buildings and highways, and scurry back to Jeffersonville and my warm car. Feeling returns to my fingers ten minutes later.
By then I’m recrossing the river on US 31, heading straight for the concrete and steel maw of downtown Louisville. Far below, a tugboat pushes a half-dozen coal barges toward the Mississippi. Only now do I remember that the Ohio River is considered one of the nation’s most polluted waterways. An inauspicious start to my environmental voyage. Nonetheless, I relish my drive-by tour of Louisville which, like most mid-sized Southern cities, boasts of its specialness even as it yearns for bigger things.
As river traffic dwindled, Louisville remade its economy with transportation, food and drink, and health care. It is, supposedly, the nation’s largest repository of “aging-care” businesses: hospitals, nursing homes, insurance companies, and health-care corporations. Yum Brands, which owns Kentucky Fried Chicken, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, is headquartered here and splashes its name across the basketball arena overlooking the river. Downtown boasts a slew of bourbon distilleries and the Louisville Slugger Museum & Factory. Nearby sits the Muhammad Ali Center, a museum dedicated to the life of Louisville’s favorite son. “Favorite,” that is, until the world’s greatest boxer began expounding upon Islam, the Vietnam War, and racism. He called Louisville “one of the greatest cities in America.” He also said “so-called Negro people in Louisville are treated like dogs.” Court-ordered busing in the mid-seventies desegregated the schools and tamped down the racial unrest that plagued many American cities. Yet Breonna Taylor was shot and killed by Louisville cops during a botched raid in 2020.
Like most Southern urban strivers, Louisville shoulders bigger-city pretensions and believes itself, incorrectly, on a par with Nashville or Indianapolis. Louisville, though, does have Churchill Downs—the Valhalla of American thoroughbred racing—and I head that direction after my quick tour of downtown.
I take South Third Street past the hospital district, some public housing, and the historic Old Louisville neighborhood with its Victorian mansions. Ballfields for the University of Louisville unfurl on the left and, then, the twin-spired home of the Kentucky Derby on the right. It’s billed as the Greatest Two Minutes in Sports, a Louisville tradition since 1875, famous for mint juleps, big hats, and springtime bacchanal. But let’s let another (questionably) favorite son of Louisville describe the scene on race day. In a 1970 magazine piece entitled The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved, Hunter S. Thompson wrote:
Just pretend you’re visiting a huge outdoor loony bin. Thousands of raving, stumbling drunks, getting angrier and angrier as they lose more and more money. By mid-afternoon they’ll be guzzling mint juleps with both hands and vomiting on each other between races. The whole place will be jammed with bodies, shoulder to shoulder. It’s hard to move around. The aisles will be slick with vomit; people falling down and grabbing at your legs to keep from being stomped. Drunks pissing on themselves in the betting lines. Dropping handfuls of money and fighting to stoop over and pick it up.
The gonzo journalist grew up in a stucco bungalow in East Louisville near Cherokee Park, one of many greenswards designed by Frederick Law Olmsted. Thompson and Olmsted each left twisted legacies behind in Louisville. Thompson hightailed it out of town for the air force instead of serving a jail sentence for throwing beer bottles through the windows of a former teacher’s house. He returned a couple of times to dip his poison pen into Louisville’s well of social and racial relations. Olmsted created a system of wonderful parks linked by tree-lined boulevards intended for “pleasure traffic,” not commercial use. His grand plan, though, eventually grew tattered and traffic-choked as the parks fell into disrepair. It didn’t help that “urban renewal” in the 1960s pushed Interstate 64 through two of Olmsted’s major parks, including Cherokee. Louisville has since added thousands of acres of green space and rebranded itself as the City of Parks.
I continue southward out of town trying to divine Muir’s route. A Thousand-Mile Walk offers clues.
“After passing a scatterment of suburban cabins and cottages I reached the green woods and spread out my pocket map to rough-hew a plan for my journey,” Muir wrote. He mostly stuck to the turnpikes and farm-to-town roads. He walked twenty miles the first day. The forest enveloped him and “the great oaks seemed to spread their arms in welcome.”
“I have seen oaks of many species in many kinds of exposure and soil, but those of Kentucky excel in grandeur all I had ever before beheld,” Muir said. “They are broad and dense and bright green. In the leafy bowers and caves of their long branches dwell magnificent avenues of shade, and every tree seems to be blessed with a double portion of strong exulting life.”
He spent his first night in Shepherdsville “in a rickety tavern.” In the morning, Muir “escaped from the dust and squalor of my garret bedroom to the glorious forest.”
Muir’s route from Louisville, today, follows the same urban-to-suburban-to-exurban-to-rural trajectory found in every Southern state. Outer Louisville is home to the usual assortment of fast-food joints, gas stations, strip malls, affordable subdivisions, mobile home parks, and circa-1980 churches with big lawns and bigger parking lots. Tractor-trailer cabs sit in the occasional front yard. A cement plant, a wood pallet maker, a junkyard. Dixie Bowl (“the BEST ENTERTAINMENT VALUE in Louisville”) beckons along the Dixie Highway, aka US 31. Train tracks run parallel to the road. Gone are the wide expanses of forests and grasslands. The US Forest Service predicts that as much as twenty-three million acres of trees—equivalent to all of the forests in Kentucky and South Carolina—will be lost to development across the South by 2060. Beyond the cities, the South is getting nibbled to death. Everybody wants a “ranchette” on their slice of rural heaven, it seems. Munfordville, where Muir spent his second night in a log schoolhouse, advertises one- to five-acre lots with utilities already in place. Ridge lines in north Georgia atop what Muir labeled the “most luxuriant forest” are lined with upscale “cabins” featuring wraparound porches and three-car garages. Developers build mini–horse farms along the sinewy streams that Muir crossed in the Atlantic coastal plain. Eight of the top ten states in the country losing farmland to exurban sprawl are in the South, according to the American Farmland Trust. Kentucky (tenth) lost 200,000 acres during this century’s first fifteen years.
The loss of green space is the greatest environmental scourge effecting the rural South today. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what the witty authors of The Southern Megalopolis wrote: “History suggests humans, in contrast to ants and slime molds, rarely optimize growth, particularly when multiple objectives such as profit, equity, and ecological integrity come into conflict.”
The impact of sprawl on nature-loving man is sad. The impact on flora and fauna, especially in the richly biodiverse South, is catastrophic. Birds, bees, frogs, turtles, snakes, bears, and deer migrate through forests, fields, and marshes in search of the next best spot to live and love. Yet the species-rich lands are clear-cut for housing tracts or row-cropped corn. Wetlands are filled with little regard for the unique habitats favored by bog turtles and pitcher plants. Survival for at-risk, threatened, and endangered species depends on an animal or plant’s ability to seek greener pastures, especially as the temperatures warm and the rains disappear (or intensify). Australian and Canadian researchers published a study in 2018 claiming that urban sprawl, and new farms, are mainly to blame for driving species toward threatened or endangered status. Their work bolsters other reports singling out habitat destruction as Enemy Number One of flora and fauna.
“The changes we project would have significant and lasting effects on the region’s ecosystems,” the 2014 Megalopolis report reads. “The increasingly fragmented natural landscape would reduce habitat availability, suppress natural disturbance processes (such as wildfires), hinder management actions that come into conflict with urban areas, and likely eliminate existing corridors. (And) urban sprawl will also, almost certainly, influence the ability of species to respond to climate change.”
The critters aren’t the only ones suffering. Less pasture, woodland, and wetland translates into poorer water quality. Erosion increases with fewer trees. More concrete means rainwater can’t seep into the ground and fill aquifers. It also leads to heavy runoff during storms, which inundates, and pollutes, streams and causes flash floods. (My basement flooded three times in two years.) Fewer forests, fields, and peat bogs means less carbon is sucked out of the atmosphere, fueling a warmer climate.
Disappearing green spaces also threaten other so-called ecosystem services, which the National Wildlife Federation classifies “as any positive benefit that wildlife or ecosystems provide to people. The benefits can be direct or indirect—small or large.” Milkweed, for example, sustains butterflies and bees in prairies and pastures. Roaring streams attract trout-fishing enthusiasts. Scientists discover new medicines in the wild. Backpackers groove on forested trails. Nature, studies show, nurtures psychological health. Three-quarters of Americans say contact with nature is very, or extremely, important for their health and emotional outlook.
Can we put a price tag on nature, then? Robert Costanza tried. In a seminal 1997 report in the British journal Nature, the cofounder of the International Society of Ecological Economics pegged the value of the world’s ecosystems at thirty-three trillion dollars a year. In 2011, Costanza recalculated and set the new value at $125 trillion, a sizable sum considering that the world’s entire GDP at the time was seventy-five trillion.
Critics scoff at any attempt at putting a dollar value on nature like it’s some sort of commodity to be bought and sold. Environmentalists recoil at the cost–benefit analysis of something as intrinsically wonderful as a saltwater marsh or the trill of a dark-eyed junco. Nature, after all, is like love. Money can’t buy it.
Yet Costanza, who analyzed the economic value of seventeen different ecosystem services, made people think. These services are critical to a functioning, livable Earth. They support mankind’s welfare and, therefore, should be considered public goods. It costs a lot of money to make up for their absence. Consider the lowly insect, for example. Bees and other bugs fertilize our crops for free, so, without them, we’d have to pay armies of workers to brush pollen on fruits and nuts. German researchers estimated the non-bug cost to agriculture at more than two hundred billion dollars a year. Closer to home, the Georgia Forestry Foundation placed the ecosystem value of the state’s twenty-two million acres of private forest at thirty-eight billion dollars a year.
In John of the Mountains, Muir wrote, “In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world.” Surely, now, in 2022, with the horror of a global pandemic hopefully fading, Southerners have learned valuable lessons about the importance of Mother Nature and our responsibility to treat her right. At least, I’d like to think so.
I wanted to test my post-pandemic hypothesis of hope on somebody smart who ponders the big, existential questions like “Whither Southern ecology?” and “Has the cul-de-sac met its match?” Adam Terando came immediately to mind.
Adam is the lead author of the pithy Southern Megalopolis report. He’s a research ecologist with the US Geological Survey in Raleigh, where he explores the interplay between ecosystems, land use, and climate change. I called him upon my return from Kentucky to learn what’s changed since 2014. I wished I hadn’t.
“I don’t see much difference,” Adam says. “This is still an attractive region with a favorable climate and the Atlantic Ocean and the mountains nearby. You have lots of jobs, and those jobs are attracting more jobs. It’s a virtuous cycle in terms of fostering a strong economy. But, consequently, there’s a lot more urbanizing going on. As housing gets more expensive closer to town, people continue to move further and further out where the affordable housing is. State departments of transportation want to accommodate that demand, so they build more highways which then makes it more feasible to build further and further out.”
Case in point: Chatham Park, an under-construction, seventy-five-hundred-acre colossus of twenty-two thousand homes a half hour’s drive west of Raleigh, North Carolina. The town’s vision: “We’re creating way more than buildings and roads.”
Adam isn’t so sure.
“They’re taking up a huge amount of land that’s currently rural, either forested or farmland, and they’re platting out a whole new town,” he says. “It’s the same lack of imagination we’ve had for seventy years. Our entire transportation and housing systems are oriented around the automobile. Multiple generations of people have grown up with a certain idea of what it means to be in a city, which is really like being in a suburb or car-burb. Changing that mindset is like turning a big ship.”
Adam lives in an apartment in downtown Raleigh near his office at North Carolina State University. He walks to grocery stores, parks, and restaurants. A bike-share program affords cheap, carbon-free transportation. For a boy who grew up on an Illinois farm, Adam believes real cities can save the natural world. Southerners, though, have a twisted view of nature.
“Our relationship with nature is very selective and values a certain aesthetic above all others,” he says. “Why, for example, do we have big, green lawns? Those loblolly pines in our backyards? People think of both of those as ‘nature.’ And our suburbs are built and marketed in such a way as to give the appearance of a greater resonance with forested ecosystems and nature. But they are not. There is such a disconnect with true nature.”
But if we don’t know what nature is, how can we save it?
“Maybe your Mr. Muir would have an answer for that,” Adam says.