The futility of forestry and an ode to the hillcountry

And a major life update

I spent all day yesterday crawling through a privet- and tick-infested hellhole in the rapidly urbanizing inner central basin of Tennessee. Once known for cedar glades, limestone sinkholes, small farms, and the flattest ground in Tennessee, it is now a garish mosaic of suburbs and shopping centers juxtaposed against dense cedar thickets in abandoned fields, abandoned farms, and the occasional holdout tending to his cattle or horses. Some farms have taken advantage of the new clientele and are turning to eco-tourism as a way to stay afloat in a world where developers call every week offering money and cultural ties to the ground recede every year—old neighbors die, young ones leave, new ones arrive, and the hills that once were landmarks are replaced with industrial centers and apartment buildings.

The privet and cedar thicket I waded through was one such abandoned farm. The remnants of care were clearly visible: bits of old roads, now covered in brush, that once led between fields and through the patches of oak-hickory-ash-cedar forest native to this region; an old watering pond with a solitary turtle, now inaccessible unless one swims through the thorny sea of privet and blackberry to stand under the sycamores and hackberries and black willows at the water’s edge; a dozen deer stands scattered through the woods in places that now lack visibility beyond a few yards and are incapable of providing chances to shoot the still-abundant deer that have been an ecological winner in this fracturing landscape; camouflaged tripping hazards in the form of rusted fences a foot deep in the gnarled walnuts whose low branches indicate a past world in which the sun was more available to them.

The Tennessee coneflower, an imperiled species endemic to our central basin

I was there because the farm has been sold to developers, and foresters like myself sometimes get hired to take stock of the existing native trees for the sake of canopy-cover policies and the like coming out of Nashville. Basically, I’m a cog in the wheel of Davidson, Williamson, and Rutherford counties being able to brag about how “green” their cities are some day or providing the statistical data they can use for political fodder as politicians push for or against various environmental policies and building codes. It’s all nonsense, really.

The farm no longer provides significant aesthetic, ecological, or economic value other than the prime real estate it occupies. The amount of physical labor that would be necessary to restore the farm toward increased function, whether anthropic or ecological or both, is staggering. The ravages of time have been exacerbated by the exotic species terrorizing the native flora, if only to trained eyes.

“One of the penalties of an ecological education is that one lives alone in a world of wounds. Much of the damage inflicted on land is quite invisible to laymen. An ecologist must either harden his shell and make believe that the consequences of science are none of his business, or he must be the doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well and does not want to be told otherwise.”

— Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

¹Some of the issues have a compounding effect. For example, the privet—both native and exotic—encroaching from the field edges would normally have a hard time penetrating the closed canopies of abandoned forests and most of the half-decent timber was cut out two decades ago, creating little incentive for manmade disturbances in the woods. However, the emerald ash borer that hit Tennessee a few years ago has killed virtually every green ash in the area and the blue ash are starting to die back now, creating countless openings perfect for the proliferation of all kinds of nastiness that most people will never see, simply because it’s so miserable to crawl through it.

The Tennessee milkvetch, an imperiled species native to our cedar glades

It could be fixed (i.e. restored to a primarily native composition that benefits native fauna and provides sustainable extractive potential for human use) with years of hard work and decades of patience, and that’s the only thing that can fix it. There’s no policy out of Nashville or D.C. that solves this. There’s no benevolent contribution to The Nature Conservancy or effort to increase recycling that improves this abandoned land or the thousands of acres like it in middle Tennessee. There’s no forester or wildlife biologist that can be hired. The only option, and the option that has already been discarded in favor of an incredible payday, is the labor of an occupant.

It is this reality that forces me to confront the futility of my profession daily. I can’t save these places from degradation, to say nothing of development. But I can be the laborer who works whatever ground is allotted to him in this life. I can be the hand that wields the shovels, scythes, axes, and guns that manipulate the ecosystem back toward something greater.

So that’s what I’m gonna do.

“I have read many definitions of what is a conservationist, and written not a few myself, but I suspect that the best one is written not with a pen, but with an axe.”

— Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

I grew up in the middle of the flat central basin, a place that once held Tennessee’s only concentration of the most productive soil type in the world—mollisols—although ours were a bit rockier than normal. Those soils are mostly covered up by concrete and asphalt now. Daddy grew up a few miles to the east in the gentle hills of the eastern highland rim, another agricultural hotspot in Tennessee that is far more intact today. But it is the land between, the steep irregular ridges and hollers characteristic of the boundary between the outer central basin and the eastern highland rim, that is my favorite place in the world.

If you look closely, you’ll see a little speck in the middle of Tennessee

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve daydreamed about living there while working or hunting or hiking in its woods or even driving through its windy roads, taking in the squat, rugged beauty of this westernmost vestige of anything resembling Appalachia either in spirit or relief, unless you count the Ozarks or Ouachitas. Other than Short Mountain only a few miles away as the crow flies—which is the only tie that can be claimed by the region to the geologic forces that created the Appalachians—it can’t really be called mountainous. The nearest places meeting that description are the Cumberland Mountains a hundred miles to the east.

But I like the hills. Don’t get me wrong: mountains are beautiful. But part of me has never stopped relating to Bilbo’s reflection of Frodo as someone still in love with the little creeks and rivers and hills, as yet feeling no need to venture into the wider world beyond. I’ve been looking for a chance to live in this region ever since I moved back home from school in Knoxville, Tennessee, and it came a little sooner than expected through no skill or otherwise deserving quality of my own.

I love it all, but the eastern rim and outer basin are my home

So next month, if the good Lord’s willing and the creek don’t rise, my wife and I will be moving just a few miles to the north to an old house on enough acres to get our hands dirty. She’s dreaming of chickens and garden plots, and I’m dreaming of deer stands and woods. We’re dreaming of the kinds of labor that are certainly overly romanticized, but also present in our blood. I’m gonna upgrade from practicing forestry five days a week to six, so don’t be surprised if an applied ecological tone becomes more prevalent here (and feel free to unsubscribe if you’re not into that!).

We’ve got our work cut out for us.

1. If you want more ecologically-minded essays with input from Aldo Leopold, check out my old essay “Washing the future into the sea.” You might see Leopold or similar thinkers pop up in two other substacks I enjoy as well: Over the Field and West of 98.