We met up with my mother to wander in the woods at the annex before grauwulf went back into the office last week, and she mentioned that she had been reading an essay by Robin Wall Kimmerer about needing a pronoun for living things of no or unknown gender that doesn't group them with the entirely inanimate. (Trees are beings; your frying pan is a tool. When you start seeing trees as tools, issues arise.) Some days later, furious at the walled garden suburbia neighbors who called the power company to cut down bits of my elm tree that weren't over their property (the same ones who took down the black willow because it didn't fit with their garden design, and then cut back my shrubs 2' to my side of the fence before installing white plastic 6' privacy fencing) I did a little googling and found two essays:
Nature Needs a New Pronoun, and
Speaking of Nature (slightly longer, and with college student reactions). There might be more.
Meanwhile, I got a trio of
Weird Walk zines full of glossy colored pages, overexposed photographs, and musings on walking the British countryside. Dolmens and ancient rites of way and beating the bounds (which is of course already in my head as a warding or claiming ritual via Diana Wynne Jones...) The British countryside is full of history known and half-remembered, at the edge of a continent where people have been marking their spaces with stones large and small (and sometimes earthworks to go with them) for thousands of years. The Weird Walk writers talk about rambles about the countryside as a thing different and less formal than the planned and gear-centric hiking that the US is prone to. (In the UK, 100 miles is a long way. In the US, 100 years is a long time.)
I love standing stones and centuries-old buildings, but I live in a part of the world where written history begins at the apocalypse. 400 years ago, the people who lived here were dying of imported diseases, soon to be pushed out of their land in many and varied ways by a tide of invaders from across the ocean. They did not leave behind them stone monoliths and ruins and border walls; their cultures built in mounds (of earth, of oyster shells) and ecosystems, which have since been cut down, plowed up, invaded, poisoned, and paved over. There were walks here, but they were not a day's ramble. They were marked by trees, for traveling hundreds of miles on foot spanning a distance between places rather than marking a boundary around them.
Someone on my twitter feed told a story about how the native peoples of the Great Lakes region crashed the European fur market; they saw beaver pelts were a valuable trade good, so they let the beavers spread out and inhabit more land, and twenty years later there were so many beaver pelts to trade that the US Government invaded to stop the supply. It's not a story I'd heard before, but parts of it sound entirely plausible... (I mean, not that the US government needed that excuse to push out their boundaries.)
So we have a European-language-speaking wasteland of big ag, suburban lawns, and concrete shopping malls, dotted with fragments of ecosystem that can barely support the plants and animals who are trying to live there, let alone any humans. Carved up along map-based boundaries, seeded with plants and small creatures from distant continents that crowd out what belongs here. The MD master naturalist e-list has been discussing jumping worms-- yet another class of not-from-around-here earthworm (most earthworms are not from around here) which not only wriggles violently, but processes forest floor debris into little pellets with the look of coffee grounds that are inaccessible to the plants and seriously degrade the ecosystem. I think I saw a few at the annex when we were there.
How do you get rid of jumping worms? So far what I've seen is that burning helps. Controlled burns are part of this landscape's heritage, recycling nutrients in the absence of earthworms, preparing crop fields, and selecting for a canopy of nut-bearing trees that feed everyone... Works great in a land where the forest is communal property & everyone is on the same page about how to take care of it (ki). Our forest is an oddly-shaped 13 acres bounded by several other people's forests, not to mention a whole bunch of modern-built houses which nobody wants to burn. I also have yet to look up fire laws for Baltimore County.
There's a place not far from the annex where the caretakers do controlled burns regularly to maintain its peculiar niche habitat-- the serpentine barrens at Soldier's Delight, which were burned and then grazed and now burned again to keep the trees from overgrowing the things that grow there. They have volunteers to help with the burns, but getting certified includes not only training, but the ability to carry a 50 lb pack of fire wand and fuel for hours at a time, over uncertain terrain with the ability to run away if something goes horribly wrong. I've carried an archaeological screen and a field bag over miles of uncertain terrain, and that was over a decade ago and I was deeply terrible at being a pack animal then. So I start wondering how much good can be done with a garden flame weeder, in a light drizzle, and I don't even really know how to research that. Possibly in the hypothetical someday that we get a building out there (a toilet & some wash water would be very nice...) I can go on to do test plots of deer fencing. Further subdividing the woodland into yet smaller bits.
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