Do not think, then, that the fruits of New England are mean and insignificant while those of some foreign land are noble and memorable. Our own, whatever they may be, are far more important to us than any others can be. They educate us and fit us to live here in New England. Better for us is the wild strawberry than the pineapple, the wild apple than the orange, the chestnut and pignut than the cocoa-nut and almond, and not on account of their flavor merely, but the part they play in our education.
Thoreau does not call wild strawberries “just as interesting” as pineapples. He does not say we could learn “just as much” from our local fruits. He calls them “far more important to us”—specifically for their educational value. Local fruits and local places teach us about our roles in nature—not just as naturalists or scientists, but as parts of ecosystems. The landscapes where we live are the ones we are most responsible for, and they teach us about the consequences of our actions.
My own sense of responsibility for the landscape where I grew up burgeoned when I learned how my ancestors had participated in shaping it. In the 1790s, my great-great-great-great-grandfather John McCullough bought 250 acres of forested land near Burnside, Pennsylvania, and spent the rest of his life clearing and farming it with his wife and twelve children. In 1880, his granddaughter Mollie married a logger, who also built things out of wood, especially wagons. Mollie’s brother owned a sawmill, ran a lumber company, and opened a coal mine. Through the first decades of the 1900s, her daughter and son-in-law worked for a coal company. By the 1970s, my father was growing 20 million trees a year on farmland John McCullough and his neighbors had cleared. I grew up with young forests and orange creeks because my own family had created them. By teaching local ecology, I give students a similar sense: This is the place where we live, that we have shaped and continue to shape. This is the place where our children will live.
Ecologist Josh Donlan and other advocates of rewilding—especially reintroducing large carnivores—start from the premise that “earth is now nowhere pristine.” They argue that because our actions affect every ecosystem on earth, we should claim this responsibility and manage ecosystems intentionally. Surely there are no better case studies in how human actions shape landscapes than the landscapes where we live. Certainly, educators need to help students make global connections—when they drive across campus instead of walking, they might contribute infinitesimally to a change in the mist regime of an epiphytic orchid in a rain forest canopy in Costa Rica. Interactions with our local landscapes are simply more immediate and concrete. When I take students in western Pennsylvania to compare invertebrate communities in streams with and without acid mine drainage, they understand the results within the context of their lives. They come from old company towns. Their uncles sell mining equipment. Their neighbors work for the power plant. They mountain bike on slag piles. And they like to fish. Doing local ecology provides a direct impetus to take ownership of our home landscapes, to accept our responsibility as stewards.
This third lesson is perhaps the greatest social benefit of local ecology: It is well to cultivate adults who can pay attention and continue to learn from nature. “Those who dwell, as scientists or laymen, among the beauties and mysteries of the earth, are never alone or weary of life,” wrote Rachel Carson, who developed her sense of wonder in an industrial city near Pittsburgh. But as a society we also need citizens who take responsibility for the ways they interact with nature. This may be best learned through the intimate and practical interactions we can only have with the landscapes in which we live.
G. M. DONLEY
That Better Place; or, the Problem with Mobility
LOOK OUT THE WINDOW OF an airplane as you take off from just about any American city and you see a vast carpet of loosely woven streets and parking lots extending far from the city center, gradually disintegrating into loose threads at the fringe. The approach to most European cities, by contrast, is characterized by an abrupt shift from open farmland to the tight-knit tangle that characterizes places laid out before the rise of developers and highway planners, neighborhoods that grew organically based on how far people could walk.
Centuries ago, traveling great distances was slow and difficult—and often dangerous. For people who came to the American continent from far away, getting here entailed significant hardship. Think of traversing a tumultuous ocean in a leaky wooden ship full of rats to get to a vast wild continent with extreme weather and exciting new hazards like poison ivy and rattlesnakes. The heroic narrative of mobility had its evil counterpart as well: if you were brought to this hemisphere as a slave, that meant someone else had the power to control your movement. So it’s no surprise that the freedom to move is an enduring aspect of American mythology.
But a funny thing has happened: the rise of increasingly fast, safe, and affordable transportation over the past hundred years has made it so easy to move around that there really isn’t any challenge or heroism to it anymore. Yet the psychological allure of going to a “Better Place” endures—whether one is migrating from one side of the country to another or between municipalities within a metro area. Mobility is romanticized throughout popular culture in everything from cowboy hats to road movies to every car ad you ever saw. For all its romantic appeal, though, there is also something less than noble about constant motion: for many Americans, the default response in a “fight or flight” situation has become the latter—run away. Welcome to the Land of the Free, Home of the [no longer at this address, skedaddled to the suburbs].
Easy mobility
