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).  

Flip-Flops in Winter with Leopold

These are not Aldo Leopold's feet.  To my knowledge, Leopold never wore flip-flops.

It is getting to be political season again and there is talk of the flip-floppers, the wafflers, the crowd pleasers who will switch their opinions as it suits them.  Although I understand the concern—it is nice to feel that we can trust what someone says is based in truth—flip-flopping can be the logical outcome of new information or greater awareness.  (Oh how I wish some people that I know and love would flop on some issues.)  In science, we should always be able to flip or flop if the evidence overwhelming says we should do so.  So the talk of flip-floppers always makes me as uncomfortable as actual flip-flops (what a questionable piece of footwear). 

Our Conservation Biology class is finishing A Sand County Almanac – I have read it a few times now and I must say it does get better with each read as I get older and, naturally, wiser.  I listened to an interesting video of one of Aldo Leopold’s former students who read some of the essays and told Leopold that they sounded a bit preachy and that he needed to explain how he came to his conclusions.  In essence, I think, the student was saying, reveal your flip-flops.  In “Thinking Like A Mountain” Leopold does this.  I have come to think of this passage as his road to Damascus as where in the bible Saul comes to a dramatic realization that he’s after the very people whose side he should be on and in a blinding revelation he flip-flops and becomes Paul.  Leopold’s revelation may have not been quite as swift and dramatic, but his trigger happy finger had been more than ready to shoot at any wolf his eye saw, a practice encouraged and condoned as part of their pervasive predator-control.  He says:

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes.  I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.  I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise.  But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” (P 130) 

There’s even a light in Leopold’s story—perhaps we should have renamed Aldo at this point.  (Waldo?)  It was years before he formally changed his position on predator control, but something shifted for him here.  He flipped.  In light of new observation and additional evidence, he changed his position.  We are lucky he did so—otherwise, we might not have this book and we might be less likely to admit our own mistakes and be ready to reverse course and hope that in the end we can make up for our past sins.  

January to December: A Sand County Almanac

Writer and naturalist Janisse Ray recently visited Miami University to tell us about “Being Human in Wild Times.”  She hails from southern Georgia’s long-leaf pine territory not so far from the place I grew up in coastal SC—she sounded like a long forgotten friend and she had a passion for pines which is rare in those parts. As she spoke of the long-leaf pine ecosystems that she loved (I would say who would not, but history suggest the answer may be many), of which 97-99% have been lost, she made a connection between fragmentation of the habitat and fragmentation of our communities and families, suggesting that our detachment from the land has perhaps became possible as we left the communities of our upbringing and the natural habitats that were part of our cultural heritage to move on to somewhere better where we were more anonymous and less tied to our past and surroundings.  Would we be better stewards of our natural resources if we knew we would live and die in the same place we were raised, where we would watch our children and grandchildren grow up? 

One of the joys of rereading A Sand County Almanac with my students is rediscovering the love that Aldo Leopold has for his small patch of land in Wisconsin and what a great student he is of his 80 acre parcel.  I no more hear geese without thinking of him. He makes me want to love my 0.5 acre parcel a lot more even if there is slightly fewer grouse in my yard—but there are weeds buried somewhere under that snow that I regularly fail to cherish.  From January to December he finds himself out at his “shack” on the weekends getting to know his community—the chickadees and grouse, the rabbits and deer, the prairie chickens and woodcocks, and of course the plants that many of us never take enough notice of—the white pines (his beloved) and red birch, the Silphium and Draba. He relishes the least of these.  And from an old agricultural field, he helps the land return to what it once was even it was on the verge of forgetting and in doing so build a natural community.  He doesn’t speak so much of the human community that he may or may not build when he is there, but he mentions the neighbors who have treed a coon or collected the honey from his trees, and he doesn’t seem to mind sharing his bounty. So perhaps loving the land can also connect us to community. Or at least slow the pace down. 

It is a work-weary world, it seems, that keeps us too much out of nature and too much glued to the keyboards and the warm glow of our screens.  In Ohio, we are quite enveloped in snow and a brisk chill, which I have been enjoying on my daily walks with the geese flying in the blue sky with great purpose.  Tonight the edge of the chill is being taken off by the heater, as well as a log in the fireplace, which Leopold notes “is the sunlight that is now being released, through the intervention of my axe and saw, to warm my shack and my spirit through eighty gusts of blizzard. And with each gust a wisp of smoke from my chimney bears witness to whomsoever it may concern that the sun did not shine in vain.”  He reminds us that we are connected and part of the land, that we will leave our mark on it one way or the other, with the axe and with footsteps we leave tracking across the snow.     

Neil Young in the Anthropocene

(I did not insert any links in the text--I'm not sure why they are popping up and I can't seem to get rid of them.)

The Anthropocene--the proposed new epoch starting with the Industrial Revolution when the impact of humans became geological--it's a good word.  It rolls off the tongue and you can fit it into almost any conversation. Even conversations where you wouldn’t think were related: mammograms, the Lego Movie, Yellowstone, Martha Stewart’s Southern Comfort Punch—it doesn’t take long until you see it all points to the Anthropocene.  One conversation where it does belong is in any chat related to Neil Young’s new song, “Who’s Gonna Stand Up.”  Have you heard it?  If not, you can find it on YouTube:

The refrain *currently* goes like this: 

Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who's gonna say that she's had enough?
Who's gonna take on the big machine?
Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
This all starts with you and me

However, I would like to respectfully submit a suggestion to Neil Young: 

Who's gonna stand up and save the earth?
Who's gonna say that she's had enough?
Who's gonna take on the big machine?
Who's gonna stand up in the Anthropocene?
This all starts with you and me

Sure, it’s got two more syllables, but if anyone can do, Neil Young can.

Anthropocene is a word that makes you sit up and look around at the strip malls around you, at the ground tremoring from fracking, at the human expansion that has trimmed habitat into quarter acre squares. If you’re going to revise a song, fitting in the Anthropocene is a reason that makes some sense.

Flight Behavior: Science in the Arts

Monarch butterfly at Fernald Preserve in Harrison, OH where they are part of a program that marks butterflies to help study their migration patterns and basic life history--a topic that dominated Kingsolver's 2012 book, Flight Behavior.

I just finished reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, a fictional story about the migration of the monarch butterflies that suddenly goes awry, leaving butterflies overwintering dangerously north of their traditional spot in Mexico due to changes in the climate.  Kingsolver does what we hope a program we are developing at Miami University will do:  cross-pollination between the sciences and art to result in science-infused art that conveys some science along with being a valid piece of art.  Kingsolver has the luxury of collaborating with herself since she is trained and has worked as a scientist and she also has a talent for writing.  (Ah, collaborating with yourself—the introvert’s ideal; the NSF’s antithesis.)  The book is interesting and worth a read for sure, but it also reveals the challenges of this science-arts cross-pollination: does a scientific message get in the way of the art?

I spent last summer with a group of talented MU students from science and the arts. The group I worked with, “the pesticide group,” involved a poet working with scientists in my lab. It took us quite a while to figure out what the message was—it wasn’t just an academic exercise, because I wasn’t sure what the message should be, which I found astounding given that I had been working with pesticides for the last 20 years!  The message from the poet was expected to be “pesticides are bad,” if we boil it down. We spent a lot of time thinking about and deliberating a more nuanced message—something closer to the science, but that was worth communicating to the public.  Pesticides, certainly, can be bad, but they are also useful—whether “natural” or synthetic.  Ants in the kitchen? Do you learn to live together or pick up some ant traps at the store?  Personally, I go for the ant traps and we have certainly used more natural methods as well, but the ant traps are pretty standard around here.  And, of course, pesticide use is certainly a major part of our agricultural practices, for better or worse or somewhere in-between.  So what messages or insights do we draw from our lab’s research that can be translated into poetry?  Can the art transform the science to a new audience?  (Stay tuned for that reveal!)

I do wonder how the normal public responds to Kingsolver books.  I know a lot of my science friends love her books.  Her messages tend to be right on target for science communication, but should art have such a blatant message or should it be more nuanced and complicated?  If the message is more direct, does it end up singing to the choir or reach new audiences and open their mind?  Or is a direct message sufficient for the people who fall in the middle of an issue?  I have family members that I know wouldn’t be convinced by a novel and would find Kingsolver’s message irritating, getting her marked off their reading lists—given that they’ve rejected objective data and scientific expertise, a novel with such a direct message seems unlikely to leave much of a mark. Perhaps though for the people who have not thought about it, it makes them think about it in a new way—the way Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced people’s opinions on slavery. Inviting people to think about something in a new way and welcoming them to a new conversation --that perhaps is a noble goal and a valuable outcome.

In any case, the monarchs are on my radar and I have a few conservation biology students next spring who will also find them on their radar too (although not specifically this book).  I would love to hear your thoughts on Kingsolver’s books:  she gets the science right, but does that hinder the artistic effort? 

A Science Hero: Nalini Nadkarni, Between Earth and Sky

I recently finished Nalini Nadkarni’s book, Between Earth and Sky (2008), which is a long thoughtful meditation on trees:  the role they play in ecosystems, and in the lives of humans directly and indirectly.  She illustrates how trees permeate every aspect of our lives.  Forest canopies are her cup of tea and she tells you about them with the flare of a sugar maple in fall.

I met her when she was Miami U’s Hefner Lecturer a decade or so ago, and her visit has always stuck with me because of the amazing science outreach efforts she’s initiated while continuing to be an active researcher—from treetop Barbie, which her lab designed and sold, to prisoners growing moss, to interactions with artists and musicians and dancers.  She has taken dancers to her field site in Costa Rica where they learned about the forests and, naturally, turned that information into dance.  From data to dance!  She says of the performance with members of the Monteverde Community in attendance: “The Costa Ricans were excited to see “their” cloud forest animals and plants portrayed in an abstract but still discernible way…I also recognized the power of artists to communicate how they feel about their subjects to an audience.  Although ecologists and environmental scientists possess a tremendous amount of information about particular animals, plants, and interactions, our training dictates that we leave our emotions out of the telling…In the small auditorium in Monteverde, people seemed far more inspired than I had ever seen them at a scientist’s lecture or conservationist workshop.  Nevertheless, I knew that my “science-y” input into the dance had added something.” 

Nature has everything you could hope for, plus mosquitoes. Yet we are increasingly removed from nature even while the magnitude of our impact increases exponentially.  And we scientists will turn it all into a lecture, when really a dance seems more appropriate. Although she goes to the masses in TED talks and seminars, it also seems that she brings the masses with her… maybe that is too slow with 7 billion plus of us, but it has a huge appeal: One person who can get fired up about epiphytes, how many more people will s/he impact in the rest of her/his life?  Nadkarni seems at the cutting edge of what any research scientist is doing, so we must keep an eye on her.  She can see the forest for the trees, and each tree she can call out by name.  

Freedom Summer: The Savage Season of 1964 that Made Mississippi Burn and Made America a Democracy by Bruce Watson

Miami U’s Summer Read Program was Freedom Summer, selected this year in part because the training for young college students to go to Mississippi to help African American’s register to vote in 1964 took place at the Western College for Women in Oxford, OH (which became part of Miami University in 1974) and because this year is the 50^th anniversary of Freedom Summer.  And because “the past is never the past” according to both Faulkner and history.  Because of rain and weather, our convocation and book discussion groups were cancelled this morning, so I thought I’d let out some of my enthusiasm for this wonderful book out on my blog.

 Old as I seem to be when I see the new crop of students coming in, many of whom were born in 1996 (ahem), the events of this book were still slightly before my time.  However, by the time I arrived in the early 70s, these events were shockingly recent history and I was rather stunned reading this account—my SC education did not lead me to the history of civil rights even though it was going to shape the world I was growing up in.  I was astounded by the violence, hatred, and small heartedness of the white southern culture depicted in this book—although most were not murders or violent, so many turned a blind eye to the cruelty and mistreatment of African Americans, it is a poignant reminder of what can happen when we are not our brother’s and sister’s keepers. It’s a lesson humans do not seem to easily learn.

As disturbing as the oppression was in MS in 1964, the young college student volunteers who took their ideals to the road to help the disenfranchised and the disenfranchised who knew the risks of reprisal much more clearly who hosted the volunteers, they were very inspiring. And tough.  And tenacious.  It’s everything you hope (and then are slightly terrified by if you are the parents) in your fellow humans and the next generation—that we will take risks to make the world a better place and to help our fellow human beings, so that in turn, there is someone to help us when there is need. 

One of the memorable quotes in the book for me was Bob Moses’ thoughtful comment “We’re not here to bring politics into our morality, but to bring morality into our politics” after they had brought the stories of the African Americans in MS who were effectively and often violently kept from registering to vote—a basic right of our citizenry!  “All we want is a chance to be a part of America,” Fannie Lou Hamer said.  Ugh.  Yes, of course. We are an America that is built on compromise, but there are some compromises that are hard to make or that aren’t real compromises to begin with—the kind of compromise the Freedom Democrats were being asked to take.

  

This book has me thinking about race in our society today, how a phenotype can make such a big difference to people’s lives when all it is is a little genetic variation in skin color that influences the amount of melanin in your skin thought to protect skin from ultraviolet radiation. Seems like we make mountains out of mole hills. The book also makes it very clear how shining light on something and increasing awareness can really change the world.  The publicity that MS received made both black and white folks aware that the views they had were not necessarily shared around the world or throughout the US, and that changed all of them. Awareness. We do not all have to agree with each other (although we do have to protect one another’s basic human rights), but being aware of the wider world can make us all wiser.  The southern experience of Freedom Summer made the young volunteers wiser, if more cynical about the political process and human nature; it made the disenfranchised aware that the view held in Mississippi was not held everywhere and that people cared and were willing to take risks; and it made the enfranchised aware of the abuse of power and that the times were changing.

Although science is perhaps in some ways, completely different, I can see parallels on the ability of knowledge of nature to change the world. Science is a process of seeking to find the light of knowledge. And the natural world is becoming increasingly disenfranchised—I hope we are all brave enough to work together on this issue, which could arguably be our Mississippi.

I hope you read this book if you haven’t.  It is wonderful. (And I loved so much more in this book that I've mentioned here...like the power of song!)