With issues such as development, zoning and land-use legislation, toxic waste and air pollution almost constantly in the news these days here in Western North Carolina, I’ve been thinking about this business of the desecration of the environment, and who it might be that is going to lead us out of this self-destructive paradigm that was set into motion with the Industrial Revolution and has continued to gather momentum in the last century and a half with the rise of free-market capitalism. Where are the “dirt-doctors,” the earth-healers? I keep asking myself. Where are the great charismatic voices in government that might begin the work of turning things around? And if not in government, then in the culture in general — where are our leaders? It seems that when looking in all the obvious places, there is no one addressing the really pressing questions of our day: overpopulation, development, preservation, free-trade capitalism.

It seems to me that it has always been the naturalists who have led the way toward a more progressive thinking whereas questions of balance and sustainability are concerned. That it is the nature writers who have positioned themselves on the front lines of the myriad battles to save and preserve the environment. And through their writing have sown the seeds that would sprout as ecological movements, private foundations and governmental programs focused on the long view, whereas the welfare of the country’s and the planet’s natural landscape is concerned.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, I think of natures emissaries such as John Burroughs, John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau — the pantheon, really, of nature writers who not only set the stage, but set the standards for those that would follow in their footsteps, people such as Aldo Leopold, Rachael Carson, Loren Eisley, Frank Waters and Teilhard de Chardin .... followed in the next generation by such writers, mid-century, as Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry and Annie Dillard. All of these writers, over the past 100 years, have made an indelible impression on human consciousness and the American landscape. In fact, it was Loren Eisley who wrote: “If we turn the pages of the great nature essayists we may perceive once more the role which the gifted writer and thinker plays in the life of man — pure observation giving way to awe, and the obscure sense of the holy.” In Eisley, like in ecologian Thomas Berry, author of The Dream of the Earth and The Great Work, I hear a call for a spiritual “conversion experience” as a possible solution to our more tangible ills regarding the environment.

During the winter months this year, I’ve spent a great deal of my time wedded to my old Amish rocker — reading the work of America’s nature writers. I have re-read much of the Riverside Press set of John Burroughs writings — 12 books in all — almost all of which were written in the barn of his rural home in the Catskills. His Indoor Studies, Breath of Life, Under the Apple Trees and Field and Study being most favored in that collection. In a chapter “Phases of Animal Life” from Field and Study, which was published in 1919, Burroughs speaks with perceptive hopefulness, yet almost naively, about environmental balance. “The natural balance of life in any field cannot long be disturbed. Though Nature at times seems to permit excesses, yet she sooner or later corrects them and restores the balance. The life of the globe could never have attained its present development on any other plane. A certain peace and harmony have come out of the perpetual struggle and warfare of opposing tendencies and forces. When one force pulls down, another force builds up.”

While things look, today, a little more ominous with regard to the global environment than they did in 1919, one would hope that Burroughs’ observations and predictions might, in the long run, be correct — that nature can hold her own against the destructive forces of industrial expansion and human failings as they exist at this, the other end, of the century.

Along with Burroughs and his prolific output were other prolific writers of his era who also made their mark on this century’s collective consciousness. Emerson’s essays on “Self Reliance,” “Nature” and “Prudence” were cornerstones upon which Thoreau, Muir, and later Leopold, Eisley and Carson would build their word-based temples to Nature, and which administrators like Theodore Roosevelt would use as a “bully pulpit” platform from which to extol his governmental programs to leave large tracts of American wilderness undeveloped and undisturbed for posterity. Emerson stands as a citadel — a lighthouse on the rocky shores of the American psyche — whereas ethics are concerned with regard to the preservation of the environment. His writings are the launch-pad for Thoreau’s fireworks that would come soon thereafter, as well as for the elevated message of Thomas Berry, who would emerge on the forefront of the spiritual-environmental movement more than a hundred years later.

In 1836 in his first book, titled Nature, Emerson was already preparing us for the dilemma we find ourselves facing today regarding sustainability, commerce and the environment. “Broader and deeper we must write our annals — from an ethical reformation, for an influx of the ever new, even sanative conscience — if we would trulier express our central and wide-related nature, instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our eyes. Already that day exists for us, shines in on us at unawares. The idiot, the Indian, the child, the unschooled farmer’s boy, stand nearer to the light by which nature is to be read, than the dissector or the antiquary.” Emerson’s words speak to us today even more profoundly than they did to those during his own lifetime, as the world’s and this country’s population has far exceeded its carrying capacity, and unchecked commerce has ravaged the land, air and waters. Able to see for himself our current situation, Emerson would be appalled, yet would have earned the right to say, in response, “I told you so.”

And John Muir, a man who, quite literally, “walked the walk,” hiking and traveling thousands of miles in his lifetime across this continent and through uncharted wilderness. How many pairs of boots this man must have gone through! His “Thousand Mile Walk” alone, trailblazing a path down the entire east coast of the country (which brought him within a stone’s throw of Jackson County) when he was 29 years old, is statement enough of his exuberance and dedication to the cause of the environment, much less what he would go on to do for the remaining 46 years of his life. “Such an ocean of wooded, waving, swelling mountain beauty and grandeur is not to be described.” Muir would write — reminiscent of Bartram before him — of his first impressions of the mountains of Western North Carolina: “Countless forest-clad hills, side by side in rows and groups — all united by curves and slopes of inimitable softness and beauty. Oh, these forest gardens of our Father! What perfection, what divinity, in their architecture!”

It was largely Muir and Thoreau that would become the godfathers for the American environmental movement that was quite literally spawned by Muir’s Sierra Club, Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring, enjoined then, later, by the whole bioregional movement on the West Coast — with poet-activist writers such as Gary Snyder, Peter Blue Cloud, Peter Berg and Lee Swenson leading the way. Snyder, in particular, with his Zen approach to wilderness terrain, has taken the torch of deep ecology and has run with it through the ‘60s — and a generation of protest marches and social actions — on into the present day. In such seminal works as The Practice of the Wild, he has, in a sense, handed the torch of sustainability off to a whole new generation of activist nature writers, whom I am going to call “The New Naturalists.”

“If you would learn the secrets of nature,” Thoreau wrote, “you must practice more humanity than others.” That credo, more or less, sums up the ethos of the new naturalists. They are not only talking the talk, they are walking the walk. They are not only writing an engaged prose and poetry that evokes the spirit of “The Old Naturalists” and their tenants for a premeditated and sustainable future, but are quite literally engaged in a kind of activism that is, at once, journalistic and/or literary and biographical. They are, through their work and deeds, inspiring, organizing and participating in non-violent actions and activities that provide alternatives to community apathy and destruction of natural habitat.

There are many such voices that have manifested themselves in my generation, appearing across the width and breadth of the country. Figures such as Rick Bass have emerged as a voice of stewardship in the plains region of Montana. A little further South and East there is Wes Jackson, in Kansas, who is writing about sustainable agriculture (New Roots for Agriculture, published by Friends of the Earth) and earth stewardship. In Kentucky, Wendell Berry, who is more of Snyder’s generation, is writing about preservation of rural community and family farms. These are but some of the “new naturalist” voices that have emerged in recent years and are stretching the paradigm of protection and proper proportion out into the direction of the 21st century. Closer, here at hand, to my Tuckasegee River home, and what I am going to call our “Smoky Mountain News” bioregion, there are a handful of ‘60s generation writers who are distinguishing themselves as “new naturalists.” Over in Swain County, George Ellison has already established himself as part of the new breed of nature/activist writers with his poetry, prose and journalism. If there is anyone who has embraced and embodied the writing of Thoreau and Kephart it is Ellison. As someone who lived for some time without electricity and running water — in a cabin only approachable by foot — his knowledge of nature lore and Native American history in this region is approaching the level of being encyclopedic. His newspaper columns, his frequent nature-walk workshops, and his contributions to the living folklore of the region have been and continue to be invaluable in educating the public about its past as well as its invasive present.

Here in Jackson County, whitewater enthusiast, wilderness and recreation writer and poet John Lane has taken up part-year residence in a remote cove off Johns Creek Road in the Caney Fork section of Cullowhee in a beautifully reconstructed one-room saw-mill shack built by Macon County native Keith Monteith. Lane is actively involved in water and land development issues in the region while writing a book on the Chattahoochee River. His journal-entry book Weed Time, which was written in Whittier during his years while residing there up Camp Creek Road at the old Jim Smith nursery, is a snap-shot, or better yet, a petroglyph, of place-based awareness. His investigative journalism work in behalf of ecological issues here in the mountains and down on the other side of the Blue Wall in the South Carolina piedmont in Spartanburg County are written, thoughtfully, in attack mode, leaving no stone unturned. While his journalistic work is brash, aggressive and unmovable, his poetry written here in and about these mountains is equally in the other direction — gentle, sensitive, fluid.

Waking in the Blue Ridge

In the animal light of early morning

dreams persist but I am quickly

victim to the world’s precision —

how oaks become one

in a web of blue above,

and the fox bursts

toward the nested quail,

or in tricks of color

copperheads coil

where they could not be.

All this in the hour

before breakfast, in the heaven

of unnoticed verdancy and light.

There is Christopher Camuto, whose writing on fly-fishing, red wolves and the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is the stuff of supernovas. His rise to prominence as a Southern Appalachian nature writer: meteoric. His whip-cracking intellect and inspired vocabulary have been a wake-up call for other writers and for readers of regional and natural history. His mix of autobiographical and objective writing style is the next best thing to “being there,” at least in my experience. The visual images he creates with language go way beyond being merely “photographic.” They linger and last in the minds eye — for months and years on end. His book, Another Country (just re-released by the University of Georgia Press), is, in my opinion, one of the best books ever written about Western North Carolina.

Then there is Janisse Ray. A Georgia “cracker” struggling to save the southern long leaf pine from extermination, Janisse is the youngest of our regional cadre of new naturalist writer/activists but may be the rising star of the group. Her charisma, her immutable will, her strong sense of the feminine, her gameliness and grit coupled with a very disciplined and poetic relationship with language, makes her the kind of show-stopper the environmental movement needs in order to bring attention to important issues. Not only has she turned many heads in a nature-writing literary world dominated by men with her striking good looks, but has turned heads with her poems, such as the following, which pays tribute to the place of her origins:

Bone Deposit

When I am dead, put my bones in

Georgia

that made them. Give back the calcium,

phosphorous, the holy manganese that serve me well -— keepers of this unruly flesh. When I am dead, let me honor land that

struck fire within and offered to hot and hungry air a skeleton pieced of earth

that holds me aloft in the spinning and

spiraling of this world. The elements of

bones compel me. I return time and

again to feel her soil, wondering what I

search for, what hauls me back: ossein of day-myths, compound of marrow percolating subterranean veins, debt that will be freed.



Finally, but not leastly, there is an ever-expanding core group of cultural and environmental activists here in the mountains working alongside one another to create some sort of bioregional awareness as well as a sense of responsibility for our regional ecosystem. During the 1980s and early 1990s, the beast-of-burden of this movement was a publication called Katuah Journal and its loyal, hard-working heart which consisted of such WNC residents as David Wheeler over in Whittier, Marnie Muller and Rob Messick over in Haywood County, and J. Linn Mackey up in Watauga County. Espousing the values, ethics and hands-on particulars of the Bioregional and Green movements, Katuah’s main emphasis was on teaching, and its main vehicle was the newspaper, which, until its demise in the early 1990s, had a focused mixture of articles on plant lore, environmental issues, gardening and farming tips, regional geographic history, and Native American culture. More recently, the movement for a sustained environment has been enjoined by botanist/writer/activist Harvard Ayers at Appalachian State, whose work in behalf of clean air coalitions here in WNC has been influential, if not monumental. And, let’s not forget the Smoky Mountain News team of Don Hendershot and Scott McLeod, whose diligence and thoughtful writing week in and week out on the subject of the environment has served to not only educate but to focus attention on the many issues that have uninvitedly appeared here in the region where the health and balance of things natural are concerned.

So, while the times they are a-changin, as Bob Dylan correctly predicted back in the 1960s, there are forces (writers) at work in our midst hoping to, if nothing else, slow the rate of escalation and desecration down to a tolerable pace, if not bring it to a screeching halt altogether. While the amount of work to be done in cleaning up our environment might, at times, seem overwhelming, these “new naturalists” and others like them are, I’m convinced, equal to the task. This is a focused and dedicated bunch who have taken on the heavy mantle of unchecked “progress” “growth” and “development,” and with strong shoulders are wearing it well. In that sense, the welfare of the natural world not withstanding, we owe them our attention and our support as they continue in their caring and careful work.

Meanwhile, here in Tuckasegee, I go on about my daily business, as we all must, of taking care of the little world around me — planting an organic garden, feeding the birds, challenging the developers next door, supporting and nurturing through my writing the continued well-being of this paper as an active voice for our region.

“May it continue ...” as the old Apache ceremonial chant goes: this paper, this place, and these people who live here well.

(Thomas Crowe is a writer who lives in Jackson County. He can be reached at newnativepress@hotmail.com)