Beautiful, Battered Lands: Making Peace with Place from the Rust Belt to Appalachia
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University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2016 Beautiful, Battered Lands: Making Peace with Place from the Rust Belt to Appalachia Katherine Leary University of Montana, Missoula Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Leary, Katherine, "Beautiful, Battered Lands: Making Peace with Place from the Rust Belt to Appalachia" (2016). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 10653. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/10653 This Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BEAUTIFUL, BATTERED LANDS: MAKING PEACE WITH PLACE FROM THE RUST BELT TO APPALACHIA By KATHERINE GRACE LEARY Bachelors of Arts in Environmental Studies, Allegheny College, Meadville, Pennsylvania, 2014 Thesis Presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Masters of Science in Environmental Studies, Environmental Writing The University of Montana Missoula, MT May 2016 Approved by: Scott Whittenburg, Dean of the Graduate School Phil Condon, Chairperson, Environmental Studies Department Dan Spencer, Environmental Studies Department Amy Ratto-Parks, Department of Composition i ii Leary, Katherine, M.S., Spring 2016 Environmental Studies Beautiful, Battered Lands Chairperson: Phil Condon This thesis is a collection of short non-fiction essays centered on the particular landscape of western Pennsylvania and West Virginia. The essays deals with the history of natural resource exploitation in the region and its associated economic effects, using that as a basis for reflecting on modern environmental issues. Operating in the tradition of nature writing, the collection incorporates research on history, ecology and economics, interwoven with personal narrative of the author’s experience in the region and broader philosophical reflection. 3 Beautiful, Battered Lands: Making Peace with Place from the Rust Belt to Appalachia Contents: Origin Story- pg. 4 Buckwheat- pg. 9 On Walking- pg. 16 Parks and Wells- pg. 20 Gardening- pg. 28 Seeing Hellbenders- pg. 36 Permission- pg. 41 Almost Heaven, West Virginia- pg. 44 Treading Lightly- pg. 54 History and Story- pg. 59 Oil City- pg. 68 Wild Ones- pg. 74 Taking it Home- pg. 79 Bluegrass Ecology- pg. 85 Theft- pg. 91 Mixed Messages- pg. 97 Heart’s Content- pg. 105 The Name Game- pg. 109 4 Origin Story The first thing I remember is green. Not just green as a color, but a green so palpable it was a presence, green so dense that it filled the world. The child’s perspective renders everything grander, richer and deeper, distorting everyday sights until it seemed that I occupied a land of giants. In that past- tense vision trees tower on a steep slope beyond the edge of the lawn, twined with vines and supported by a thicket of tangled undergrowth, a solid mass of growth. What I saw had crossed the divide between individual trees and the collective forest, that indefinable tipping point where undeveloped spaces become more than the sum of their biotic and abiotic parts, not just places but separate entities, full of their own verdant vitality. The world was green and I was overawed, peacefully resigned to the notion that any ball rolled beyond the confines of the backyard would be swallowed without a trace by the wild wood. Looking back, I realize that this has to be wrong. In a house on the outskirts of Pittsburgh, with a yard so narrow that we could have passed things to the neighbors from window to window, there would be no room for anything approaching the kind of deep woodlands I seem to remember. At best what I was seeing was some little patch of scrub, thin regrown trees draped with scraps of grapevine, a remnant of larger forests that had been systematically cleared and fragmented over centuries of determined human expansion. It would be optimistic to have called what I saw a grove. Yet, it felt green. *** By the time I was born, many people were already making the objective case that the natural world was in deep trouble. In 1992, the northeastern cod population had sunk so low that a fishing moratorium was being proposed, and the UN was meeting to confront the larger crisis of global biodiversity loss. Humanity’s ability to shift the composition of the atmosphere had prompted the “end of nature” to be declared three years earlier, and the hearings on climate change were creating as much 5 discomfort in Washington DC as the suspiciously severe heatwaves. The ozone was shrinking, the Aral Sea was drying up, and a supertanker had dumped oil all over the Hebrides. Major environmental groups were losing active members to issue fatigue, the increasingly grim circumstances wearing down even committed advocates. There may be something unique to a generation that grows up with the awareness of mankind’s weather-warping power, hearing frantic calculations of population growth, peak oil and pollution rates as part of the background noise of daily life. The rate of environmental change in the modern era means that the world of my childhood is fundamentally different than the landscape my grandparents or even parents grew up in. True, there are some places in which that change has brought about improvements. Western Pennsylvania breathes a lot easier today than under the dark skies of the great Donora smog, for instance, and the hawks flying over Rachel Carson’s native Allegheny Valley fare better now than they did during the heyday of DDT. By and large however, more of the world bears the grubby fingerprints of human intervention today than ever before. From lands criss-crossed with freeways and pitted with excavations, to seas clogged with floating refuse and runoff-induced algal blooms, you’d be hard pressed to pick a location that hasn’t been marred by human actions. I know this and I struggle to accept it, particularly when it comes to integrating this idea of pervasive, damaging human impact with places that I remember fondly. It’s jarring to wander through some nostalgic landscape in memory, tracing the swamps and the hills, the creeks and brambles, only to recall that one key turn was marked by the rusting heap of an ancient sedan, paint long gone but steel bones still rigid beneath a blanket of fallen leaves. Other favorite haunts contained the remains of old cabins, reduced to toppled walls, free-standing chimneys and the occasional twisted metal frame that might once have been a bed. I remember fondly poking around in old fire pits abandoned in the midst of 6 the woods, fishing through the ashes to pocket shiny twists of melted glass that had likely started their lives as mass-produced bottles. Psychologists now suggest that early experiences in the outdoors are key to the development of a lifelong relationship with nature, essentially setting the script for future environmental commitment. Given the circumstances, I don’t know whether that’s an encouraging prognosis for me or not. If I can grow accustomed to seeing richness in damage, is that a dangerous thing? This kind of love could condition people to complacency over time, allowing us to become so utterly at home in the compromised world that we forget that past peaks of diversity and integrity ever existed. One day we might not worry about the gradual disappearance of the thousands of threatened species of amphibians or the decimation of bat populations, any more than we currently go around mourning the loss of mastodons or the departure of the dodo. When things are out of sight, they tend to go out of mind as well. Loving the world we have could make us vulnerable to the illusion cast by shifting baselines, too tempted to believe that the ecosystems we currently see are both the definition of normal and the fullness of what is possible. Will it be harder to envision a better world if you’ve already fallen in love with a broken one? Is the mourning, the anger, even the pain that seems to come along with a clear-eyed view of our current environmental crisis necessary to keep the fire burning for activism and change? *** Even knowing the risk of complacency and the danger of limited imagination, I find that I just don’t want to stop loving scrap forests. I don’t want to mope through the woods, weeping over the corruption of the world by human interference and peopling the pathways with the ghosts of defunct subspecies. If these altered bits of the natural world are where we first walk and wonder, then I don’t see what else can we do but love them. There, as much as anywhere else, we can learn to live in the 7 green that remains close at hand, to observe and appreciate the subtle wonders of the sanctuaries we are given. There is something egalitarian about the accessibility of little half-tamed oases, lands that don’t require a serious investment of time and money to reach, that don’t demand peak physical ability or deep wilderness knowledge. The abandoned lots and feral fields, meager as they might seem, are the freewheeling frontiers for legions of inexperienced explorers, both potential gateways to greater horizons and worthwhile ends in themselves. I was lucky. The forest with the junk car came under threat from development while I knew it, split with surveyor’s lines and tagged with pink ribbons, only to be passed over in favor of another site.