Janisse Ray’s Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

“Sometimes there is no leaving, no looking westward for another promised land. We have to nail our shoes to the kitchen floor and unload the burden of our heart.  We have to set to the task of repairing the damage done by and to us.”  --Janisse Ray

One of the joys of being at a liberal art institution and actually interacting with the humanists as a scientist, is that you discover writers who are writing the exact book you have been dying to read, but that you have failed to find. Janisse Ray is one of those discoveries. She visited Miami U a few weeks ago and talked about “Being Human in Wild Times” – she gave a wonderful talk and reading, so I ordered her book Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (1999)--her first book and the first of hers that I have read, but it will not be the last.  She weaves a tale of her human family with that of the natural world in southern Georgia where the long-leaf pine forests once dominated. She makes you feel the loss of the diversity that was harbored in the long-leaf forest. With less than 3% of the long-leaf pine ecosystems persisting today, there has also been a decline in the species associated with this habitat:  Bachman’s Sparrow, the gopher tortoise (and all the species that goes along with it), the indigo snakes, red cockaded woodpeckers, wiregrass. 

Ray links the poverty in the land to the poverty of the people, who in many ways suffer more once the habitat is destroyed.  In many cases, people were destroying what they didn’t understand and didn’t know.  She says:

“Passing through my homeland it was easy to see that Crackers, although fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t had the means, the education, or the ease to care particularly about its natural communities.  Our relationship with the land wasn’t one of give and return. The land itself has been the victim of social dilemmas—racial injustice, lack of education, and dire poverty.  It was overtilled; eroded; cut; littered; polluted; treated as a commodity, sometimes the only one, and not as a living thing.  Most people worried about getting by, and when getting by meant using the land, we used it. When getting by meant ignoring the land, we ignored it.” 

But this book is not just an environmental lesson and a reminder of how the condition of the people affects the condition of the land, it is a story of how place shapes families and communities and connects multiple generations.  It is a story of discovering the ecology of an ecosystem that her family (and many others) has altered and loved--it is about a relationship with the land, one that needs repair and awareness and connection.   

I have long been interested in how nature and the science of conservation biology can be translated to more general audiences with a message that is inspiring instead of devastating, emotionally authentic instead of contrived, and enlightening rather than didactic.  Janisse Ray translates the data of habitat destruction into a story that is both personal and scientifically astute without the reader left feeling that they are being emotionally manipulated to a specific end.  Thank you, Janisse Ray for translating the data in such an engaging and moving way.  Janisse Ray said at her talk to pick up her books at the library.  I was happy to have a copy of my own, because there were many sections worth starring and underlining! So, you might want to get your very own copy--and we will all say a small prayer that long-leaf pines were not felled to publish this book (ah, actually, published on recycled paper).