Ecology of a Cracker Childhood

"Janisse Ray tells the story of one of the world’s great forests—the longleaf of the southeastern US, an ecosystem mostly obliterated in the 19th century—through her experience of being “raised in a junkyard”, in a region most people now write off as being “as ugly as a place can get”. Her book tells this story from the perspectives of those often missing from writing about forests and trees: a child, a young woman, a daughter of a fundamentalist, a poor family with poorer neighbours, and a culture that has lived within the forest and its ecologically degraded remnants for generations. Ray is a vital, insightful writer and her voice is full of the language and modes of thought of what she calls her “homeland” of “lost forests”. In telling her stories, she unfolds the many cultural, ecological, ethical and personal layers of our relationships to trees and ecological communities. The world has always been biologically hyper-connected: every living body, every forest, every drop of ocean water is a swarm of connections. Our electronic media are the latest manifestation of life’s networks, an outgrowth of the social nature of the human mind. The medium is new, but the problems are old. Every network faces a tension between openness and walls, opportunity and vulnerability. And so the arms race that we’re all suffering through now in electronic media is a variation on an ancient theme. It manifests in the present day as a battle between those who would grab our attention and our ability to control our own time. But the tension is this: how do I belong to this network without completely losing all agency within it? This is the same problem that tree roots face as they negotiate with fungal partners below ground, that microbes face in their chemical connections in the ocean, that our gut cells struggle with as they work with bacteria. There is no way out of this tension. We cannot live in complete openness or behind high walls. So we must engage and discern how to live within the network. What I experience in my own life and in my work with students is that we’re often unconscious of just how vigorous the assaults on our attention have become. So, yes, we have shorter attention spans because we’re being invaded by the pathology of mind-grabbing micro-media. But we’re counter-evolving. I encounter a great hunger in my students to restore more control, more balance, so that we’re the ones choosing how our minutes, days, and lives will pass, not giving up that control to the algorithms of manipulation. Smelling the soil, talking to other people, holding an acorn in your hand, coming to know the sounds of birds and trees: these have great power once we wake to them, partly because they are such multi-sensory activities, engaging mind and emotion. As for the decline in contact with the “natural world”, I’d argue that a computer screen is just as natural as a mountain stream. It has more of the human mind present within its development, but that mind is natural. So I’d prefer to talk about the decline in awakened contact with “the other”, with other species, other people. And for many, yes, our connection to other species is diminished in some ways. But in other ways there is more “environmental” education and awareness now than decades ago. And the direction of this trend differs depending on class and race. For working class people in urban or industrial landscapes, the opportunities for contact with green space are much expanded, at least here in the US. The upper classes and those who grew up in the countryside see their kids and grandkids losing out on the unleashed experience of play and exploration in woods and fields. In many cities, that opportunity is now expanded, not contracted. “Our big human brains and delicate teeth evolved because wood made cooking possible. Other major technological and cultural advances also happened in relationship with trees: shelter, shafted tools, musical instruments, paper” In the case of the rural southeastern US where Ray is writing, contact with the ecological community was, for generations, forced on people by slavery, share-cropping and poverty. That legacy is well remembered in some families. People left the fields and woods for a reason, and have little interest in a return, especially one mediated by the well-meaning wealthy white descendants of the land-owning classes. This is not true in regions away from the southeast US, but race and class deserve more attention as we discuss “nature”. In Ray’s case I believe that the most important arc of her book is her exploration of what it means to grow up in ecological ignorance, to awaken to the extraordinary stories of her home, then to face the devastating knowledge that most of the ecological vitality of the region is gone, partly at the hands of one’s own ancestors and partly by economic forces that don’t give a damn about trees or people. It would be easy to paint a simple arc, but she resists this and shows us, indirectly through familial stories, how complex this process is. She connects history, religion, gender, economics, and ecology. Yes, she grew up with lots of outdoor time, but she also grew up with little understanding of where she was and what the place had been. This is a loss, only partly redeemable by later knowledge. In her awakening – one we all go through as we learn how diminished and wounded our homes and planet have become – she walks us through grief, anger, wonder, puzzlement, regret. Her writing does this without leaving us with an easy conclusion. Instead we get a fiery dream for the future. That future is one where the longleaf pine forest might be restored. This forest once covered 90 million acres — about the same area as the UK and Ireland combined. The pines grew to great sizes, widely spaced in meadows kept open by regular fire. Plant diversity in the meadows was phenomenal. Now, only about 12,000 acres remain. The rest went to timber and turpentine, then was converted to monoculture tree farms and agricultural fields. Most of the loss happened in a few decades of the mid-late nineteenth century, a startlingly rapid loss. Of course, many of the plants and animals of the forest are now gone or critically endangered. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter In some areas the forest in being restored. But these hopeful signs should not blind us to the fact that, over much of the rural southeast, the pattern of ecological abuse of the land continues. In an article last year about a coal ash dump near her home, Ray wrote: “We are suffering out here in rural America. We are watching agrarian landscapes turned into industrial ones (giant clear-cuts, giant glyphosated fields, giant genetically engineered eucalyptus plantations), and we are watching the high quality of rural life, with its hummingbirds and purple martins, its trilliums and turnips, its streams and lakes, made toxic.” One reason The Ecology of a Cracker Childhood is so important is that the injustices and violence that she describes are still underway. The study of trees is not an escape into a natural wonderland, rather it’s a way to see what is beautiful and what is broken in the world, to try to find a way forward. Yes, this ceibo tree in the Amazon rainforest grows in the most biodiverse place on the face of the planet, a forest that is also home to several indigenous cultures, people who have lived there for thousands of years. All this is threatened by extraction of oil deposits under the forest. From the top of the ceibo tree I saw forest stretching to the horizon, but I could also hear generators and drills working in the forest. Once roads and industry move into the Amazon, the forest’s diversity unravels and local peoples are displaced. Great biotic diminishment and human injustice are underway and will continue if oil extraction intensifies. But political and legal action within Ecuador offer hope that this battle is not lost. The country changed its constitution to give rights to “nature” and there is strong public support for protection of the Amazon. One indigenous activist told me, “Our politics is this: to show that trees and rivers have music, songs, and life…[to live] with the millions of beings in the forest.” That future is threatened, but still possible."