Managed Wild Donkeys at Kachana Station—Affable Firefighters in the Heart of the Outback

Australian Chris Henggeler, who runs land in the notoriously flammable Kimberley region, is about to lose his elite fire crew. And seventy donkeys stand to lose their lives. Looked at logically or morally—these are sentient, intelligent and social beings—this should not be happening. Despite strong evidence that the animals are improving the land and their behavior staves off damaging bushfires, Western Australian authorities have ruled the donkeys are to be killed, shot by helicopter at considerable expense, by the end of this month. Their crime? That they are not on the list of sanctioned species deemed native to the continent.

One theme that flows through my books is how animals create ecosystems, and how understanding this invites us to work with them to heal degraded landscapes. The way, for example, that beavers build wetlands teeming with life, or that reindeer maintain permafrost by traipsing across the snow, captured my imagination. I titled my book on soil Cows Save the Planet to highlight animal superpowers, and opportunities to ally with them to enhance environmental conditions. But no land-animal yarn has touched me as deeply as the wild donkeys of Kachana Station, those now with targets on their backs.

The basic story is this: Donkeys were brought to Australia in the 19^th century as pack animals. The advent of motorized transport meant they were no longer needed, and many were let go. The donkeys ranged through the outback, forming family groups and thriving in wild, seemingly empty terrain. Western Australia (WA), the country’s largest and most remote state, determined that the animals were pests and population control was necessary. Over time, the WA 2007 Biosecurity and Agriculture Management Act has been pushed to justify eradication. More than a half million donkeys have been killed in the Kimberley alone.

Enter the Henggeler family, who in 1991 set up home at Kachana, a cattle station as big as Singapore. Kachana’s “product” is revitalized land: cattle are managed to enrich the soil and restore the water cycle—minimizing floods and droughts—and, most importantly, diminish the ever-looming threat of fire. By 1997 the Henggelers noticed that wild donkeys moseyed to rough, rocky spots where cows didn’t go, thereby controlling fire fuel in those areas. Without being asked, the donkeys had volunteered to join the fire brigade. The Henggelers adapted low-stress, pressure-release approaches to move the donkeys to specific sites where they could do the most good.

These locations saw lower fire intensity and accelerating land improvement. Scientists came to study donkey behavior and the biological processes they sparked. It seemed like a win all-around: Kachana curbed its fires; ecologists had a living laboratory for observing animal impact; the state would avoid the unpleasant and costly task of culling while 1) promoting internationally significant research and 2) potentially easing ongoing problems like downstream flooding. Except that the governmental bureaucracy, specifically the WA Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development, or DPIRD, insists that the donkeys must go, refusing multiple invitations to see the land for themselves.

Actually, this tale really starts not with 19^th-century donkey carts, but rather tens of thousands of years ago. For the late Pleistocene Era saw the demise of Australia’s great megafauna, including the diprotodon (a marsupial the size of a hippo), marsupial lion (think lion with a kangaroo pouch), and giant wombat. Without these critters to prune vegetation and cycle nutrients and biomass, the continent’s ecology was greatly diminished.

It was this attenuated state, marked by aridity and fire-adapted flora, that early European settlers first encountered. And yet, points out Australian ecologist Arian Wallach, this “post mass-extinction world” set the accepted standard for which species are considered “native”. The prevailing notion of what “belongs” in Australia is based on ideology, not science, she says in an interview with The Country Telegraph. “There’s nothing empirical to say that a Kimberley without donkeys is more ‘real’,” she says. She suggests that it would, however, be more combustible. In sum, Australia’s wild donkeys are filling ecological niches that have been void since the last geological age. In Wallach’s words: “Donkeys appear to have stepped into the pawprints of Australia’s lost giant wombat.”

Per the scientists, here are just a few ways the donkeys at Kachana benefit the land:

• In parched areas, donkeys dig wells (the technical term for these is “ass holes”), providing water for multiple other species as well as themselves

• Donkeys interrupt “fire ladders”, when flames scale up trees. In the Kimberley, the bark of certain tea trees is especially flammable. Once ignited, grass fires can erupt into a canopy blaze. Donkeys (and cattle) eat this bark, potentially offering a tool for fire control.

• Donkeys create “spas”: spots dedicated to dust-bathing for scratching, exfoliating and recreating. These bare areas become small fire breaks that may influence the movement of fire across the landscape.

This in addition to the general positive impact of well-managed herbivores, such as pressing senescent plant material into the soil, adding moisture and fertility through their waste, transporting and depositing seeds via their dung.

Reducing donkey numbers would derail Kachana’s hard-won progress in several ways. For one, it would effectively end the research—studies already yielding valuable insights for dryland ecosystems, which account for a significant chunk of global landscapes. It would stall ecological improvements, in part because few animals leads to less impact, but also because the slaughter would break the donkeys’ trust and thereby change their behavior. The donkeys now respond to management and move as a herd. With group members killed, they would be less amenable to direction from humans. Rather, they would express their fight-and-flight instincts as individuals and scatter.

However, all this could change with a simple shift of mindset: the healthy donkey population in the Kimberley could be regarded as a great feat of rewilding rather than seen as an “invasion”. This tiny revision would make all the difference to the Henggelers, ranchers and other land managers, research ecologists, those living in fire-prone regions, and, most urgently, these precious animals that want to be partners with us.

Join me in calling for Western Australia’s DPIRD agency to #STOP THE DONKEY CULL

For more information:

The Henggelers featured on Australian Story

Report in the Sydney Morning Herald

Kachana’s Wild Donkey Project

Several episodes of the Regennaration with Anthony James, starting here

Interview with Dr. Arian Wallach

Arian Wallach’s videos: Australian Wild Donkey and the excellent Feminist Ferals

Invisible Megafauna paper by Wallach et. al.

Vines are rampant mid-summer, and across the northeast you can see them clambering up trees. The climber pictured is actually non-invasive American Bittersweet, which we have here. That funny little plant with the bubble-like seed capsules is Eastern Enchanted Nightshade—worth it for the name. The piece was originally published last year in VTDigger.

One day I walked down the hill and glanced at the trees — the stately canopy past our property’s edge. Then I took a closer look: what I thought were crowns of maple, oak and shagbark hickory was in fact a shroud of vines, likely the Asiatic bittersweet that’s been shimmying up every trunk and limb in sight.

Our land in southwestern Vermont is far from unique in being overrun by vines masquerading as treetops. Consider kudzu, known as “the vine that ate the South.”

And now, throughout New England, you’ll see trees bent and weakened by the advancing vegetation, now little more than scaffolding for leafy vines. In western Massachusetts, the Kennedy and Burbank parks contend with the “kiwi apocalypse,” as hardy kiwi — originally introduced by garden clubs and favored by Gilded Era elite — smothers native trees, while Sudbury’s Asiatic bittersweet problem is such that groups have instituted “bittersweet removal days.” An out-of-control invasive vine scenario is often referred to as an “infestation.”

Troublesome vines like Asiatic bittersweet, kiwi, porcelain-berry, wisteria and, yes, kudzu, are generally dispersed by wildlife that eat the fruit. They are persistent: emerging from seeds, sprouting from roots, sending shoots or runners from cut stems. With fast-growing vines draped across our woodlands, our beloved broadleafs have to struggle for air and sunlight.

When it comes to unwanted plants, my go-to is Mike Bald, whose Royalton company “Got Weeds?” manages invasives without chemicals. Mike does have a grudging respect for vines, and recognizes they do play an ecological role — at least when systems are in balance.

“Vines are nature’s rehab species,” he says. “They cover bare ground, stabilize temperatures, and allow recovery from disturbance to begin.” The invasion of invasive vines, then, can be seen in part as a symptom of the damage our forests, meadows and riparian areas have sustained.

He also attributes this shift toward vines to conditions that increasingly favor climbers and creepers. He notes a study from 2006 that found poison ivy — a vine that’s native, if not beloved — grows more rigorously amid warmer temperatures and increased CO2.

While many trees suffer under weather extremes, he says vines seem unbothered by drought or wet conditions. One reason hardy kiwi flourishes in our part of the world is that it can withstand below-zero temperatures. Asiatic bittersweet’s trick is that it thrives in sun or shade, forest or city lot, is fire-resilient, and can be spread both by birds and via underground roots. This canny plant has it all covered — and not only the unwitting trees.

Are our ridgelines doomed to be eclipsed by counterfeit canopies? We can start being proactive by becoming aware of them. One challenge is that these plants drift in slowly so that you don’t notice until they’re wreaking havoc — just like I was caught unawares by what I’d initially thought were treetops. At first glimpse you assume that it’s green so it must be fine.

It’s important to bring fresh eyes to the scene. Then you can acquaint yourself with the specific vines. Once familiar with the plants, you’re more likely to catch them early, before they’re established or setting fruit, while it’s still easy to pull them out by hand. Let them dry in the sun and then dispose of them safely.

For large vines that are rooted in, get them out of the canopy to keep them grounded. Mike says to cut them at the base and flag them so you can do repeat cuttings to eradicate the vines. (Eventually the plant will exhaust its reserves.)

This way, birds — those vectors of aggressive seeds — won’t have access to the berries. And watch for seedlings, which you can yank out before they get their hold on a tree.

We should also be prepared for what’s ahead. On his travels through the region Mike has seen signs that more troublesome climbers are coming our way. “Up and down the Hudson River you can see vast stretches of non-native greenery,” he says. “River corridors, rail lines and roadways are the fingers poking northward into the heart of New England.” It’s worth knowing that kudzu has come up as far north as Massachusetts.

Mike recently came by and I showed him the faux treeline. What struck him was the hole in the forest canopy, a 100-feet in diameter circle where the trees had collapsed inward. The vines were still there, sending tendrils to the next row of trees. He had just been in the Berkshires and said this was the exact pattern he observed in Massachusetts, including in Lenox’s Kennedy Park, where the kiwi reigns.

It’s on us to keep our eye on the vines. Our local trees are worth it.

Thanks to Paul Hawken and my son, Brendan (above), for the inspiration.

When my son was three years old, he insisted upon hearing Horton Hears a Who! every night. Twice. As this lasted for several months, I got pretty good at reading quickly, tearing through the opening page in one breath—On the 15^th of May, in the Jungle of Nool, In the heat of the day, in the cool of the pool—so that the words ran together, like a kind of Dr. Seuss verbal soup. Horton is a sweet story about a keen-eared elephant determined against all odds to save the diminutive Whos, despite being ridiculed because no one else could hear them.

Given all the great picture books around, this restrictive reading diet left me perplexed. Was its appeal that it was set on May 15^th, the day before my son’s birthday? (To this day we all mark “Horton’s Day” with a round of silly texts.) Or that it was the teensiest Who whose off-hand “yopp” finally nudged Whoville past the aural threshold? Perhaps it was Horton’s stalwart conviction that A person’s a person, no matter how small, a sentiment that must have enchanted a small boy stuck in a land of grownups. I venture it’s all three.

The feeling the story evokes so well—that of being invisible, and, in this case, inaudible—is universal. Everyone who was once a child has been there. Despite my writing a bunch of books and giving all sorts of talks, this feeling now resonates far more than when I was a young mom speed-reading to my toddler. For you don’t need to live on a speck of dust to know that today, more than ever, little people aren’t seen and their concerns rarely get heard.

We are all Whos now.

One scenario that really makes me feel like a Who—pounding brass pans so that someone, anyone, listens—is the way new technology build-outs are harming the natural world. Here in New England forests and once-productive farms are being cleared for solar, while water-hungry data centers claim chunks of land in areas vulnerable to drought. Around the globe—from India to Mexico, Papua New Guinea to Mongolia—entire areas are rendered toxic due to mining the metals that animate our devices. In several places, most notoriously Congo’s cobalt mines, children as young as six spend their days in tunnels plying ores with their bare hands.

In Zeuss’s book, Horton is repeatedly mocked for tending the particle upon which the Whos live. The mama kangaroo and her joey say, Humpf! and the gang of monkeys calls the existence of Whos “nonsense”—before conspiring to drop the speck in a sea of clover. Here in our jungle equivalent, hostility to tech infrastructure is derided as “NIMBYISM” and those opposed to it scorned as Luddites. Expanding computation and energy capacity is vital for progress, even marquee environmentalists tell us. As for the ecological and human cost, well, we can’t achieve a “green energy transition” without making a bit of a mess.

We also hear from our political reps, many of which stand to benefit handily from AI expansion, that the spread of resource-intensive language-model apparatus is “unstoppable” and “not going away.” Really? The truth is: people don’t want this. At college commencements, tech titans called in to inspire new graduates about AI’s rosy future have been met with boos. But you have to listen hard, past the din of machines and the money—a bunch of zeros on a screen—that feeds them. It seems the plan is to ram all this development through so that a critical mass are dependent on the technology and the rest of us have no choice but to use it. “Inevitable”, indeed.

We need to keep listening—and we need to keep speaking. For we don’t know whose “yopp” or “yapp” or any other utterance will break through the racket. It could be the cries of juvenile sea turtles that drift about the Blake Plateau, a biodiverse undersea basin now eyed for mining nodules rich in rare metals. Or the weeping of Gullah/Geechee ancestors, thousands of whom died here during the Middle Passage en route to slavery in Charleston. Or the plaint of hundreds of villagers in a 1000-year-old Scottish village gathered to call bullshit on claims that a massive new “hyperscale” data center would serve the community. Or the high-pitch cackle of the Andean Flamingo. Outrageously pink on stick-thin legs: Dr. Seuss would have had fun drawing them. The birds are lamenting that their wetland habitat in the Atacama Desert highlands is being pumped to produce the lithium essential for energy storage.

There is indeed a crescendo of voices railing against the spoilage and surrender of nature for tech. Just like the townsfolk of Whoville, we need all of us to exclaim, as loudly as we can, We are here! We are here! We are HERE!

It’s that precious trillium time on the mountain.

Anyone familiar with my work knows I hold a living-earth view of climate: the understanding that nature regulates climate, primarily through the water cycle. This is potent knowledge. We know we can rehabilitate even extensive damaged ecosystems, so we can restore at least some of that capacity. It’s also a perspective missing from most media and policy discussions of climate change.

Anyone who’s spent time with me knows this omission drives me crazy. This past weekend I joined a panel on Challenging the Prevailing Climate Change Narratives during the Global Earth Repair Convergence, an online/on-site gathering of global Earth restorers and the restore-curious. Here is an edited version of what I said:

Bringing water and life into the climate conversation is something I’ve struggled to do for a long time. Over the years I’ve been laughed at by editors I pitched and scientists I spoke to: Carbon in soil matters for climate? Oh, you silly uninformed girl. I used to joke that if I pitch “ways to ally with the water cycle to promote regional cooling”, I get a shrug, while a piece on “why climate change means more bad hair days” would sell in a flash. Truly, I wish I were kidding.

Here, rather than tweaking the message I want to highlight why it’s important to broaden the climate narrative and promote a more life-centered understanding. Such an exploration may offer insights about how we might more effectively do so.

The conventional CO2 story has failed to mobilize the public in a meaningful way. Sure, there are plenty of organizations and meetings and guides to effective climate communication, but the groundswell has not materialized—this though the vast majority of people worldwide favor stronger climate action. My friend Peter Donovan, who writes the Substack “Managing Wholes”, points to one reason why: the lack of feedback. Carbon is invisible. Greenhouse gas emissions could go down and no one would see an immediate change. It is hard to keep motivated when the cause-and-effect quotient is so abstract.

However, let’s say a city restores its urban forest, or a farmer collective revives the water cycle by holding water in the landscape. People will experience a difference. It will feel cooler, less oppressive; grassland birds like bobolinks will return. In other words, there is actual feedback. This sparks continued engagement.

The CO2-only story undermines people’s agency. The standard advice to the climate-concerned is to “take climate action”. Sounds good, but what does this mean? Advice generally involves changing consumer habits (i.e. choosing an electric car, installing heat pumps, recycling), advocating for decarbonization efforts, or—and this gets a lot of airtime—initiating conversations about climate change to break the taboo. The message is that ordinary folks are bystanders: our job is mainly to say the right things and buy the right stuff. The real climate solutions—those that do more than wreck-the-world-less—are about physics and technology and policy. In other words, it’s best left to the experts. The rest of us can protest oil companies and make compost, but for the most part we’re left waiting for others to do something. Plus, those who can’t tout their virtues, who can’t, say, afford solar panels or maintain their health on a plant-based diet, may feel guilty. Given how destructive our species has been, some people feel shame for the mere fact of being human. As a result, many check out.

By contrast, the living climate approach is empowering. There’s much that each and every person can do. Earth repair, after all, is a participatory sport, and enhanced ecosystem function on every scale matters. Today, many in the global south struggle for lack of work while those in the global north suffer from a lack of work-that-matters. A focus on ecosystem restoration could create opportunities for meaningful employment—while improving local conditions at the same time. In regions beset by degraded landscapes, this could allow people to stay in their communities rather than be forced to seek work in large cities or abroad. Under the conventional narrative, however, such a scenario remains invisible.

The usual framing fails to meet people’s pain, nor speak to their longing. There are new books out on climate emotions, and an emerging field of climate psychology and climate-aware therapy. From what I can tell, these miss an opportunity to introduce what’s possible upon seeing our predicament through the lens of regeneration—nature’s proclivity to heal. So many, especially the young, contend with climate anxiety and nature loss. It is important to do right by them, to help them envision a viable future and a place for themselves within it. The current clinical go-to is traditional psychotherapy, offering compassion and strategies to help break paralysis. A counselor can assure you that you’re not crazy to worry and you’re not alone; make space for you to acknowledge your grief; and encourage some form of climate action (see above). This is fine as far as it goes and can be helpful. But without the nature piece—understanding how nature works and the potential to ally with these processes—the route to full flourishing is narrowed. Bringing in the living world’s regenerative processes invites people to take part in healing landscapes, and in so doing heal themselves.

The conventional narrative is disconnected from the whole person. In portraying climate change as a matter of molecules, it’s as if we could heal the earth without touching anything. The answers are all in our heads. We sign on to slay the Keeling Curve via the remedy de jour: rules and offsets; cheaper-than-cheap renewables; contraptions that lock carbon away. But our bodies and hearts know otherwise; the knowledge that we are of the Earth and part of the web of life stirs deep within us. Without a doubt, our challenges are daunting. How much more so when we cleave to the rational, severed from the embodied rhythms of the more-than-human world? No wonder so many feel not just helpless, but lonely. Situating climate—and situating ourselves—within the living world can turn things around.

There are climate reports that do speak to the importance of nature. But these, inexplicably, render the living world as little more than a carbon sink. Many “nature-positive” accounts stem from research led by The Nature Conservancy concluding that 1/3 of climate solutions can be provided by nature. Upon seeing this declaration lit up in bold, I thought, great! Someone’s finally drawing attention to nature’s role in regulating climate—e.g. how intact forests draw in moisture; how vegetation disperses heat—but the gist was that up to 37 percent of emissions reductions could be achieved by nature-based solutions. And so the dynamics that influence moisture and temperature, fine-tuned over billions of years, are basically reduced to a pie chart. To me, it’s far more powerful to regard nature through the lens of what it does rather than what it stows.

How do we expand the climate story? By now I’ve given up on aiming to convince people, letting go of the endless pursuit of the perfectly tuned argument, believing that everyone would see it my way if I set out the facts just so. I see it more as a matter of invitation: appealing to what we’re about as humans, the capacity to meet nature through curiosity, connection, love, wonder. Our challenge is to help others to unlearn all the we-know-better humans-in-control assumptions and reconnect with intuition, the earth-connection that lives in our bodies. Ecologist Brock Dolman talks about connecting with our inner eight-year-old, to observe and be curious. Intuitively we know this, which is why the standard narrative is full of holes, and why it barely moves us. We’re in a moment when people are questioning everything we thought was solid. As assumptions crumble, the living earth story will continue to resonate, and it’s up to us to continue to hold and to share it.

Meet Jingo the Dinosaur from the 1916 War Against War Exhibit in New York: ALL ARMOR PLATE—NO BRAINS. The signage adds: “This animal believed in huge armament. He is now extinct.”

I wrote this column *nine* years ago (it originally appeared in Common Dreams). The piece has come back to my mind as I observe the shameless display of war, the drumbeat of devastation. Each military strike is not simply a point on the geopolitical ledger. It is a violent assault on people, communities, living systems, and the sense of safety that should be the birthright of every human being. Each detonation diminishes the world. Let’s rethink this.

Forgive the 2016 statistics and the reference to previous air attacks. To update you can just slot in different numbers and other countries, kind of like Mad Libs.

Thursday’s military airstrikes against pro-Syrian government forces barely made a dent in the unceasing news coverage of political drama in the White House. This in itself reveals a discomfiting reality: bombing has become so routine we barely take note. In truth, our economy is addicted to war. Recall that the stock price of Raytheon, which makes the Tomahawk Cruise Missile, soared the day after the U.S. attack on Syria, Trump’s first foray into military aggression. Only when we understand this dependence on war—and the economic distortions that perpetuate it—can we begin weaning ourselves.

The U.S. dropped 26,171 bombs in 2016—that’s three per hour—and the new administration seems determined to keep up, ordnance-wise. The sole purpose of bombs is destruction; any destruction we don’t want is dismissed as collateral damage. We can debate the political implications of military strikes, but we also need to acknowledge the ecological damage they produce. Acts of war on every scale wreak environmental harm: the release of chemicals and toxic fumes; the ravaging of landscapes, including deforestation and contaminated water sources; long-lived impacts to soil, birds and wildlife habitat. Plus, the development and deployment of weaponry gobble up an awful lot of not-so-clean fuel.

Because ecological destruction affects friend as well as foe, the use of bombs, drones and missiles is akin to shooting oneself in the foot...and the lungs and the heart. War undermines what all of us seek: physical and financial security; satisfying work and meaningful social ties; clean air, food and water. Perhaps we can skip the violence and tragedy and the inevitable backlash and move straight to restitution: reparations for damage sustained. We’ve been waging war on each other and the planet for a while now, with little positive to show for it. It’s time to launch a Marshall Plan for nature. Everyone on earth will benefit, and since healthier ecosystems are more productive there will be less reason for war.

While justifications for armed conflict center on “humanitarian” goals or getting back at “bad guys”, the impetus is invariably economic. The U.S. economy is in a stalemate because, in short, there is little left of the planet to plunder. Most of what we call “growth” reflects marginal profits from speculative transfers, as opposed to any exchange of goods or services. And there, tantalizing, our bombs and missiles loom—the choice to use them a way to stimulate multiple, political-donor industries and distract the public, if temporarily, from their government’s corruption and their own economic malaise. As our economy is set up, there’s more profit to be made in creating problems than in solving them.

Our economic model is slash, trash and burn, and so, perversely, rewards destruction. Despite the falling price of renewables, the current administration favors tearing up mountainsides and sending filthy fuels through rickety pipelines. Heck, even the predictable pipeline breaks put people back to work to clean up the damage. The same with agriculture, which somehow purports to feed us by destroying the biological system that supports the growth of crops. Then again, the skyrocketing health bill, the result at least in part of highly processed, low-nutrition food, does contribute to the Gross Domestic Product.

For a while the plunder model may have seemed tolerable, since it was easy enough to keep the resulting mess out of sight. This is no longer the case. We are at an inflection point. We can maintain the fiction of an economy that lives in a biophysical vacuum, disconnected from ecology. Or we can situate our economy in the real world, operating in real places and embedded in biological reality. I see this moment of political tension and misery—face it, no one, including those in power, is happy right now—as a symptom of the reckoning, conscious or unconscious, that our economic model no longer works and yet, on the surface at least, there seems no alternative.

Jane Jacobs, known for writing about cities, also had an uncanny understanding of the death and life of great economies. In Cities and the Wealth of Nations she warned of default to “transactions of decline”: trade encouraged to prop up the economy. For example, perpetual military production. While the economy appears robust, steering investment to defense sucks the oxygen out of a region while offering little benefit. With an economy heavy in financialization, defense, and industrial food production, what we think of as wealth—abstract figures that ride up and down the stock market—is essentially scavenging.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

All wealth is based on nature. Even fossil fuels are the product of photosynthesis: the work of ancient plants. In recent years we’ve learned a great deal about how to restore degraded landscapes and the variety of tools available. Depending on the area to be restored, we may choose carbon farming (one flip side of excess atmospheric CO2 is the loss of carbon in soil); holistic planned grazing; permaculture; water cycle restoration; and others. From rural Zimbabwe to Spain, the Australian Outback to Northern Mexico, areas all over the world are being restored. In the Loess Plateau, once the breadbasket of China, a region the size of Belgium was revived through simple techniques like terracing and erosion control. The project lifted more than two million from poverty. Indeed, beyond the headlines about war and graft there is a growing global movement dedicated to healing wounded ecosystems.

Since we know restoration is possible, we can choose to make it a priority. Ecological regeneration represents the next economic frontier. There’s certainly plenty of land in need of repair. What if we shifted investment from the apparatus of war toward rebuilding healthy landscapes? Globally, this would provide meaningful employment for the tens of millions of young people now languishing at the edges of the world’s megacities—and offer livelihoods in impoverished farming areas and rangelands. Here in the US, what better way to return dignity to hollowed out rural communities than to invite local populations to regenerate their own land? War is at once a cause of environmental degradation—and a consequence of damaged ecosystems. It’s no surprise that many of our geopolitical hotspots, as in the Middle East, are in dryland areas wracked by desertification. Improved land leads to better lives and livelihoods, and less reason to turn to violence.

If we are to survive, let alone thrive, as a species, we need to accept that each military act is violence against the Earth, and all violence against the Earth is violence against every one of us. That said, each act of restoration reverberates through the biosphere and enhances our collective wealth. Let’s hand shovels and seedlings to weapons company stockholders so they can reap some meaningful returns. Re-greening the earth is both necessary and within our grasp. It would be great if ecological healing were central to the mission and not just the work of the resistance.

This photo shows my great-grandfather Lehman Weil with his “Ornithopter” flying machine, which runs on pedal-power. After several trials, in 1927 it rose one foot above ground at Curtiss Airfield in Long Island. The piece below was prompted by a silly moment at Albany Airport: it was 5am, and when the loudspeaker droned “Your safety is our highest priority” my muddled brain heard it as “Your psyche is our highest priority.” Ah, I thought: Freud Airlines! Tony and I wrote this together, airborne.

Welcome to Freud Airlines. Your psyche is our highest priority.

Do not accept any personal baggage from someone you don’t know. If anyone tries to give you an unsolicited diagnosis, please alert the gate attendant. Be advised that frequent-flyer miles from Air Jung are no longer accepted at Freud Airlines.

We will be boarding our five-star analysands first, the order determined by the number of years spent in psychoanalysis. Any unaccompanied inner children should get in line now. We will next board our paranoid passengers. (We know who you are.) If you have multiple personalities, you may now all board together.

A list of upgraded passengers can be found on the monitor. If your name is not listed, you will have to tolerate your envy or find a more adaptive defense, like sublimation or dark humor. Sarcasm toward the gate therapist will be recognized as transference, and will therefore be analyzed ad infinitum. Narcissists seated in the main cabin may not use the first-class cabin, even if you think you belong there. Superegos too large to fit in the overhead bin will need to be gate-checked before boarding and may be claimed upon arrival.

Please wait until we are at our snoozing altitude and the seatbelt sign has been turned off before stretching out on your couch. If you happen to fall sleep, feel free to press the service call button upon waking so that a steward with a notepad and illegible handwriting can interpret your dream. The cabin attendants will be serving sacher torte and cocaine shortly after takeoff.

Passengers are requested not to let their particular phobias disturb other passengers. Smoking and other solitary vices are not permitted anywhere on the plane. Fantasies are allowed, as are fetishes, although anything violent or creepy—like the desire to have sex with your mother and murder your father—should remain carefully stowed in the unconscious, now located in the compartment above you. Be aware that contents may shift during the flight.

Our journey will last precisely 50 minutes. Make sure that your seatbelt is properly fastened and snug around your waist. If you happen to be obsessive-compulsive, you may want to check it again. And again. And again.

We are anticipating some unsettled weather. In case of turbulence, be sure to take your Xanax pill yourself before offering pharmaceutical assistance to those sitting near you.

We will be landing in Vienna shortly. Raise your egos to their full uptight position. Please check the seat pocket for any personal defenses you might need. The stewards will do one final run-through to collect all remaining neuroses, compulsions, and inadvertent slips of the tongue.

Upon arrival, please head to the baggage claim area, where your guilt, fears, and complexes will be waiting for you at Carousel Sechs. Be careful to identify and retrieve yours, because many cases look alike.

Thank you for flying Freud Airlines. We know you have the illusion of free will when it comes to choosing a carrier. And a final, friendly note from your cabin crew: some may find the notion of a sleek aircraft jetting through virgin space as symbolic. But before you get too worked up about this, recall the insight of our illustrious father figure: “Sometimes a plane is just a plane.”

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From The American Scholar. Judith D. Schwartz and Tony Eprile live in Vermont. Schwartz is an environmental journalist whose most recent book is The Reindeer Chronicles and Other Inspiring Stories of Working with Nature to Heal the Earth. Eprile is the author of Temporary Sojourner and Other South African Stories and the novel The Persistence of Memory.

From Field Studies, the annual magazine of the Field Naturalist M.S. cohort at University of Vermont. The theme of the issue is “myths”. Photos by Tony Eprile.

I was scrolling through rentals, a place to hole up for two weeks within visiting range of our son in LA, when a listing caught my eye: a 250-square-foot unit by Windansea. Now, 250 square feet is barely big enough to stretch your legs after a beach walk. But the notion of Windansea Beach lit a spark in me. Once I saw the place was affordable, I decided this was our spot. Back in 1991, my husband, Tony, and I had rented a tiny beach house two short blocks away. I remembered that California interlude: long hikes in the chaparral, sandwiches piled high with avocado, the sound of the ocean at night. And, of course, the daily ritual of viewing the sunset, holding your breath while you watch for the elusive green flash. Tony and I toyed with the idea of staying in coastal San Diego before a teaching job pulled us back east.

The prospect of revisiting our past amused us, and we went in good spirits. We were relieved to find that unlike much of the area, where condos upon condos fill every buildable space, the neighborhood largely retained its atmosphere. There was the same surf shack covered with palm frond thatch and, at the bottom of our street, the pump house made famous by Tom Wolfe’s quasi-anthropological writing on feral surfer youth. Some of the remaining bungalows were getting a mansion upgrade—which meant constant construction clamor—but the neighborhood had the same easygoing feel.

There were some happy surprises, like the raucous colonies of seals and sea lions basking on the cliffs by the La Jolla beaches, more—and rowdier—than I recalled. And the multitudes of brown pelicans sailing in great squadrons (yes, that’s the proper term for a group of pelicans). A California friend said that when she was growing up, pelicans were endangered, largely due to the impacts of pesticides. While I hadn’t known this, I was thrilled to see so many, their arrival heralded by sweeping shadows. Yet I was unnerved to see so few shore birds, like the sanderlings that run into and out of the water, as if on rollers. When we went tide-pooling at Bird Rock, Tony was dismayed to find no brittle stars.

I was struck by the extent to which my body remembered the place, especially my feet. I seamlessly fell into the rhythm of strolling along Neptune Place, the promenade above the beach where people show off their toned physiques and swanky dogs. Once down by the ocean I scrambled on the rocks, sure of foot as though I’d memorized the shapes of the boulders. It was as if I were stepping into the skin of the person I was 30-odd years ago, when I was in my late twenties. This sense of dipping into the past reminded me that I was, indeed, this same person in the same body.

But oh, so much has changed.

More than anything, what’s different is how I see the world, and myself in relationship to the world. Back then I trusted that the system we lived under made sense, that there were sensible rules to follow and grown-ups in charge. People cared about pollution and those grown-ups were doing something about it. To wit, the Clean Air Act, the Endangered Species Act, and public service ads that everyone saw. Sure, I’d witnessed lapses, like the Vietnam War and Watergate. But the bad guys in Watergate, including the president, were held accountable, weren’t they? As for Vietnam, protests made clear that young people—by definition our future leaders—preferred love to war. As a nation, we’d wised up. I couldn’t imagine our government getting us mired in such a cruel and pointless conflict.

* * *

We inherit the myths of our time. I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s in a suburb near the General Electric headquarters in Schenectady. I dwelled in a world steeped in confidence. Science and technological advances would make life better for all. The nuclear family was the pinnacle of social organization. The United States occupied the moral high ground and was by all accounts the best place to live. Journalists were truth-tellers and, as Watergate taught us, could be heroes. Schools were good and opportunities for women were opening up, including at top-tier colleges that had recently gone “co-ed.” If I studied and worked hard, I would succeed, and success, by definition, would be “meaningful and fulfilling.”

There were hints of dark undercurrents. People shrugged at the race-baiting of the Reagan and elder Bush years and the folly of trickle-down wealth. The first Gulf War was presented as a grand spectacle of America’s weaponry. While living at Windansea for the first time, I learned hostilities had started when I glimpsed a neighbor’s television screen, emblazed with colorful graphics. Few talked about pollution anymore. Rather, you could be a good environmentalist by donating to organizations that subsequently thanked you with tote bags and calendars. The grown-ups knowingly told us to conserve electricity and buy better light bulbs. Fortunately for my hometown, General Electric, built by the light bulb, had moved on to more lucrative fare, like financial services and healthcare.

As we breached the 2000s, the myths I’d held began to crumble. With dubious elections and poorly executed, needless wars, I could no longer claim—even to myself—that my country was fair or benign. Add to that the inevitable disenchantment with people in my personal life to whom I had granted authority, a disillusionment everyone faces. As I sloughed off outworn assumptions, I began asking questions about conventions and structures I’d once taken for granted.

Painful as this shedding was (how I longed to believe smart people could assure me all was okay!), it was also freeing. It felt like the cerebral equivalent of clambering over rocks, confident I’d find a toehold despite cracks amidst the stepping-stones. In time, I tripped and lost my footing: I’d bumped into those myths, in this case about those smart people who evidently knew better than I.

But did they?

You see, I started asking questions about economics: economies that humans create, economies of nature, and how the two intersect. And about climate, asking the basic question: how does the earth manage heat? It seemed to me that biology—life—was missing from some important conversations. For example, climate was considered the purview of physics, and climate change was all about greenhouse gas emissions. I remember the moment when, chugging through an assignment, I penned a line that contradicted everything the professionals said about climate change. I wrote: We could remove all the carbon we want from the atmosphere and still suffer the floods, droughts, and wildfires attributed to CO₂-driven climate impacts. Oh my! This is true: what creates and regulates the conditions we call climate is the interplay of water and land; flora, fauna, and fungi. I looked at the sentence and the sentence looked back at me. Am I allowed to say this?

The experts I interviewed confirmed that I’m not, at least if I wanted to be taken seriously. Several solemnly assured me that the workings of the water cycle and the state of the soil—factors where we have agency—may affect local climate, but as for Global Climate Change it’s only CO₂ that needs watching. But after all those years I’d gotten used to dispensing with myths and not letting myself be seduced by certainty. It has long troubled me that climate change was presented to the public as revolving solely around carbon, as if we could adjust the climate by dialing up or dialing down the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere. As if we could fix the planet without touching anything. But I knew that to mend the harm we’ve caused we need to touch the earth. Perhaps more importantly, we need to be touched by the earth, to be alive to its patterns and propensities, its wisdom and mystery.

This quest to explore climate through the lens of nature propelled me through writing three books on, respectively, soil, water (focusing on “water” as a verb), and the growing grassroots ecosystem restoration movement. In the beginning, this pursuit was kind of lonely. But now I have plenty of companionship as more people want to talk about things like the social lives of fungi, how animals create landscapes, and how healthy forests drive the movement of moisture around the globe.

* * *

When we got back to Vermont it had turned to spring. We missed the crocuses, now just a tangle of stems, but soon the bloodroot emerge. Then trillium, then Jack-in-the-pulpit. I prowl the edges of the forest to catch glimpses of these ephemerals, as if on a safari. They keep me company while I grieve the state of the world, the dark currents I’d sensed earlier now swelled to rogue waves, seething and roiling and telling the same stories that make less and less sense. Increasingly, I pay more attention to those who ask questions than to those who proffer answers. At times I lament the absence of grown-ups to reassure me everything will be fine.

It’s time to let go of the myth that I could outsource my own knowing, that someone else can promise me everything will be okay, and in so doing make it so. I can own my commitment to working with nature and my belief that every bit of ecological healing matters. I can trust my intuition and where it takes me, just as I trust my feet.

The first thing I notice about the cloud forest is its lovely, gentle sound. I walk along a path narrowed by trees and moss-covered rock and hear the light whisper of water, faint but constant. It is a soothing sound, but rather than white noise, I’d say it’s more like silver, or crystal, such is its brightness and fragility. Indeed, this high-montane forest preserve has a crystal-like name: Joya del Hielo, which roughly translates to Jewel of Ice. ‘Ice’ because the temperature is always cool. Here, in central Mexico’s eastern Sierra Madre Mountains, the mist and the high altitude guard the chill. At least they do for the time being. Alas, nearby logging and land clearances making way for farms and pastures are altering the humidity up in the hills.

My guide today is Roberto Pedraza Ruiz, a naturalist and prize-winning photographer. In 1987 his mother, Martha ‘Pati’ Ruiz Corzo, co-founded the Grupo Ecológico Sierra Gorda, a conservation and education organization that protects the cloud forest enclave. Pati, once a high-heel-wearing music teacher during her city years, lives in a small mountain cabin surrounded by ancient sweet gum trees. She is short and stout and fierce; she is driven by a passion for the earth and its ‘beauty-ness’. I have watched her stand before legislators at the Mexican Senate in a drab brown tunic and rubber-treaded sandals and move the formally attired officials to tears, laughter and song. In 1997, through sheer determination and a refusal to keep quiet, she managed to convince the state of Querétaro to declare one third of its land – some 383,567 hectares – a biodiversity reserve.

The headquarters of the Sierra Gorda alliance is an education and training center in the town of Jalpan de Serra, a three-hour-plus drive from Querétaro airport where Roberto picks me up. The last stretch rising into the hills is one of the most dizzying experiences found outside an amusement park: switchback after switchback, swerving away and then driving directly at the sun. (Roberto had recommended Dramamine.) At some point we start passing over and through the clouds. Sometimes the mist thins out, revealing purple and red mountain flowers and bushes with yellow blooms. Sometimes I can see only the ghostly silhouettes of trees.

The road glistens and the leaves on the trees are wet; pines droop under the weight of moisture clinging to needles. It is early March and the rainy season doesn’t start until June, Roberto says, emphasizing that the dampness is from the humidity alone. Roberto, who is now in his mid-forties, says that when he was growing up the rain was soft and light, but in recent years it has come in heavy and sudden downpours. Today Roberto is happy to be driving amid clouds. ‘The cloud forests have been stressed,’ he says. ‘It’s been a dry winter.’

The route to Joya del Hielo the next morning is also zigzagging, but not vertiginous like the airport run. Roberto watches out the window for birds and reports on what he sees: clay-colored thrush, oriole, woodpecker, kestrel. ‘This area is a stronghold for bearded wood partridge,’ he says, referring to a long-tailed forest fowl with a red beak and breast the color of cinnamon. ‘I haven’t been able to photograph it – that’s a big frustration in life. I saw one with chicks and made a call, but they were too quick.’ On another occasion he and a film team finally gave up on one and left the site at 2 a.m., only to return the next day to find it had shat on their equipment. Roberto frequently arranges for photographers and film crews to visit Joya del Hielo. A few years ago the BBC came to get footage of the bumblebee hummingbird, the world’s second-smallest hummingbird, which weighs less than a penny.

After bumping along a dirt road for a few minutes we arrive at the edge of the cloud forest reserve and are greeted by a fallen tree crossing and obstructing our way into Joya del Hielo. It proves too heavy to move. Roberto dispatches his chainsaw, and after getting through and driving for another kilometer, we get out and leave the car. I grab a notebook and my water bottle. Roberto shrugs. ‘I don’t need water in the cloud forest,’ he says. He grabs his camera and a machete.

As we walk, Roberto points out jaguar scat and the spot where a puma and jaguar had a fight; the forest is home to all six of Mexico’s feline species. Life appears in layers. Spiky bromeliads – in Roberto’s words, ‘flats for frogs and salamanders’ – jut out from the trunks of hardwoods, while cacti are growing in the nooks of trees. Flowering carnivorous plants, with sticky leaves able to catch and digest insects, grow on limestone. Roberto peers up at a large oak tree where various orchids reside. ‘There’s a whole ecosystem on that one,’ he says. Further on we pause at another large, grand oak, clothed in mist. ‘This is the king of the forest,’ says Roberto. ‘His “brother” passed away six years ago in a storm. The former owner of the land said, “How much charcoal can be made from that?” ’

The abundance of life in the cloud forest is stunning. Everywhere you look life is dripping, climbing, crawling, dangling, hiding, sprouting from, nesting on, nestled in. ‘Those are 500- to 600-year-old cedars,’ Roberto says. ‘I don’t know why they spared them.’ He notes that the previous owner was known to log with impunity.

Some 200 meters past the cedars, we reach an area where Roberto has identified three previously unknown species of magnolia, two of which have been found only in this forest. (One variety is named for him: Magnolia pedrazae.) He calls magnolia ‘living fossils’, since they are considered earth’s first flowering plants. This section of the cloud forest, at 2,000 meters above sea level, is a nursery for rare magnolia trees. Now that they are known to be here, and are protected from chainsaws and browsing cattle, the magnolia population is rebounding. When they bloom, the fragrance suffuses the whole forest, Roberto says. ‘Here’s a young one. There is hope for the species. When you look closely, nothing here is alone.’

The thing about water is that it depends upon water. When land in the area below Joya del Hielo is cleared of vegetation for farming and firewood, this means less water circulating in the vicinity, a key aspect of what Roberto calls stressors to the cloud forest. If the lowland dries out, it becomes that much more difficult for a higher-altitude forest to make a cloud. Moisture in one place informs moisture elsewhere. As the late poet Tony Hoagland wrote in ‘The Social Life of Water’, ‘All water is part of other water. / Cloud talks to lake; mist / speaks quietly to creek.’ Similarly, the loss of water in one location can have the effect of drying out another. For example, depleting an aquifer for irrigation wells, as is happening across North America’s agricultural lands, lowers the water table so that nearby streams and wetlands dry out and wildlife has no place to go. As many of us who’ve seen these patterns playing out have realized, aridity is contagious.

When rain soaks in and is held in the soil, the area stays moist and covered in plants. When the surface is exposed, water evaporates or runs off, leaving the land parched and, in certain environments, prone to fire. Climatic conditions are largely determined by how water circulates, how it moves across the landscape and through the air. Water problems like floods and droughts are often symptoms of climate change, but supporting the water cycle can help regulate and moderate temperature. To a large extent, the story of climate is the story of water.

Plants, particularly trees, are central to the wetting or drying of a landscape. For one, trees embody water. According to Andy Lipkis of TreePeople, an NGO in Los Angeles, the root system of a mature tree can retain tens of thousands of liters of rainwater. Bill Mollison, the late Australian scientist and early teacher of permaculture, which applies insights from nature to farming and design, said ‘a tree stands there as a barrel of water’. Trees are also continuously putting moisture back into the environment. With their vast green surface area, they hold and evaporate water. More significantly, they transpire, as water moves up from the roots and out through the leafy canopy. A good-sized tree can transpire 400 liters of water each day.

You can think of a plant as a water pump, pulling moisture from the surrounding soil and releasing it as vapor. From the plant’s perspective, this process is vital for regulating its own temperature because transpiration is a cooling mechanism, in that it consumes energy. Turning liquid water into a gas not only uses energy, it also dissipates the heat beaming down from the sun. Solar energy hitting a bare surface – think midsummer tarmac – creates ‘sensible heat’, or heat you can feel. If instead that radiation falls on vegetation, thanks to transpiration it becomes ‘latent heat’, suspended in the water vapor through space and through time. This is one reason Joya del Hielo feels so cool: those plants that fill every available niche are busy transpiring, which postpones the unleashing of heat and ensures it remains in the realm of potential.

In the aggregate, as forests, trees are moving around tremendous amounts of moisture, and therefore energy. I've interviewed Brazilian scientist Antonio Donato Nobre, who described forest-driven ‘aerial rivers’: bodies of moisture that sail, unnoticed, through the sky. He said airborne waterways above the Amazon rainforest contain more water than the mighty Amazon River below, as twenty metric tonnes of water flow out from the trees and into the air. The notion of water continuously floating above the earth reminds me of the Hebrew word for sky, which is shamayim, or ‘there is water’. I had always found this curious. Likewise, in her essay ‘Clouds’, Rachel Carson writes: ‘Up there is another ocean – the air ocean that envelops the whole globe.’

Antonio Nobre likes to say, ‘Every tree is a geyser.’ To a large extent weather comes down to the agency of trees. Trees cast out moisture, but they also pull it in. According to a theory called the biotic pump, the cumulative transpiration of trees in a forest forms a low-pressure zone which creates a vacuum that draws in moisture. This laden air cools and condenses over the forest, and we have rain. A healthy forest is at once generating its own rain – that soft, crystalline song in Mexico – sending water abroad and tugging water in from elsewhere. It is a dynamic system, as moisture both rides the current and creates it. Trees and clouds are talking to each other.

Past a certain threshold, however, tree loss interrupts the dialogue. This worries Roberto Pedraza Ruiz, who says that a patchwork of small, protected forests does not function in the same way as a large wooded expanse. Meanwhile, it has been a few years since I interviewed Antonio Nobre and encountered his poetics of the rainforest: seeing thick, extensive forest as a ‘green ocean’, with waves of humidity lofting over and across. What seemed eternal now feels unnervingly provisional since the world has, with appropriate horror, witnessed the relentless felling of trees in the Amazon basin.

That deforestation leads to drought and even ecological collapse should be news to no one. The demise of civilizations like the Mayans, Anasazi, Easter Islanders and (at least in part) of Rome offer a cautionary tale. Alexander von Humboldt, a naturalist and adventurer born in 1769, wrote that cutting trees on hillsides ‘seem[s] to bring upon future generations two calamities at once; want of fuel and a scarcity of water.’ In his 1864 book Man and Nature – original title: Man the Disturber of Nature’s Harmonies – George Perkins Marsh, the nineteenth-century diplomat and scholar whom many consider America’s first environmentalist, wrote of the need to restore forests to ‘devise means for maintaining the permanence of its relation to the fields, the meadows and the pastures, to the rain and the dews of heaven, to the springs and rivulets with which it waters the earth’.

Back to the Amazon basin: at what point will the trees and the clouds stop communicating? How many more blows of the ax before the great, damp inhalations and exhalations, the sources of moisture for so much of the hemisphere, are stilled?

Part Two to follow

Photograph by Roberto Pedraza Ruiz

Granta Issue 153: Second Nature

Photo by Tony Eprile. First printed in the Bennington Banner

I remember watching This Changes Everything, a film about the climate crisis and its roots in capitalism. I felt outrage at greedy oil execs and grief about fires so intense you can hear the incendiary crinkle. At the solutions part—glimpses of an aspirational future—I felt a different kind of unsettled. The utopia showed solar panels stretched to the horizon, sunlight glinting off metal. Was this our dream scenario: endless fields of hardware? It felt cold. Something was missing: life.

This is not a diatribe against solar energy. (Full disclosure: we’ve had a modest array since 2019.) Rather, I’m concerned that solar has been presented to the climate-worried public as a panacea, that a wholesale switch to solar would stabilize the climate. The veneration of solar has taken up the oxygen in the climate conversation.

My inner alarm rang upon learning about Shaftsbury Solar, the 20 megawatt project that entails clearing 40-plus acres of forest about ten miles north of my house. Vermont’s Climate Action Plan had instituted steep emissions reductions, and the expedient way to meet this mandate is to ramp up solar. Despite honorable intentions, our legislature rolled out the green carpet for out-of-state corporate entities to vie for the incentives, carbon credits, and tax write-offs on offer, as well as opportunities to rebrand as “sustainable”. In so doing, the State is sanctioning the destruction of ecosystems, thereby undermining climate resilience. Plus, such measures reify the exploitative capitalism that climate action was supposed to counteract.

As I see it, the rush to solar-at-all-costs derives from two misunderstandings. One is that climate change is about carbon. Climate action is discussed in terms of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, primarily CO2. Certainly rising CO2 is a climate problem, but it’s not the only factor and it doesn’t occur in isolation. If we inquire how the earth regulates climate, we see it’s largely through the water cycle. Water’s phase changes—from solid to liquid to gas and back—retain, dissipate, transfer and release tremendous amounts of heat. In turn, these water processes are driven by the actions and interactions of flora, fauna and fungi: by life. In other words, destroying unscathed ecosystems (e.g. a mature forest) undercuts their climate-regulation capacity, regardless of what the numbers say about carbon.

Another misunderstanding is the assumption that solar replaces fossil fuels. Many Vermonters see conceding chunks of land to bulldozers as justified because of the oil and gas that won’t be burned—albeit in another state. Unfortunately, this is not the case. Rather than substitute for fossil energy, renewable energy adds to the amount of energy used.

One 2019 study entitled Energy Transitions or Additions? finds technological energy advances prompt increase use of the original source. For example, the advent of fossil fuels offered alternatives to wood burning. However, this meant more forest clearing, because now there were gas-fueled chainsaws, log trucks and lumber mills, setting the stage for a building boom. And so, paradoxically, a new type of energy creates the conditions for further resource exploitation.

This paper was written before the deployment of AI, which now tags along on every search and video call (unless you can figure out how to disable it). AI data centers require vast amounts of electricity for computing, memory and temperature regulation. Globally, this now uses as much energy as Japan. Where will the power come from? We might have trusted Vermont’s solar bounty would heat New England homes, but it will more likely enable ChatGPT queries. The growth of AI seems inexorable, even if no one’s been given a choice. How many hillsides are we willing to lose to fuel AI’s latest iteration?

Two days before the PUC approved the Shaftsbury project I attended a Merck Forest program on “Vermont’s Wild Future” with Executive Director Rob Terry and The Nature Conservancy VT State Director Eve Frankel. It was sobering. As we strolled the forest trail, Rob noted the trees in trouble. He said ecologists are resigned to losing nearly all ash to the emerald ash borer, and now beech leaf disease is decimating one of our most common trees, vital to bear, deer and pollinators. We might see beech another five or ten years. I glanced at the trees around me and shuddered. I felt I was standing in the shade of ghosts.

The Shaftsbury forest in question has many robust white ash trees with no sign of the disease, which could aid researchers’ quest to study ash resistance. Rob Moir of the Massachusetts-based Ocean River Institute provided testimony to the PUC and reported several old trees six-plus feet in diameter. He called it a fine example of Rich Northern Hardwood Forest and attributes its vigor and diversity to the geological composition and nutrient-rich soil of the Taconic Range.

The Merck event brought home what’s at stake: a redoubt for songbirds; food for bears; a buffer against flooding. The business interests behind the project will certainly make money: yet another story of private profit with costs borne by nature and the public. Alas, we’ve misread the repercussions of surrendering our landscape to solar. We think we’re slaying the dragon, but we’re really just feeding the beast.

I glance at the mound of plants at the edge of the garden, the yield of several hours of wrestling with the ditch lilies and irises that had taken over. Especially the lilies, with their long, sinewy roots, and tubers that can pop up a new plant in no time. I muscle them out of the ground and offer them to friends and neighbors via Front Porch Forum. How satisfying to be so magnanimous: these are vigorous plants, generous with their blooms. Any other year I’d be enjoying the array of purple and orange, cutting the flowers for the table. But this isn’t any other year, for I’ve fallen in love with native plants.

For more than a decade I’ve written about restoring landscapes – ways to ally with nature’s healing processes. I’ve reported on ecosystems revived, even transformed, enough to know that even extensively damaged terrain can return to ecological function. I’ve often highlighted restorative grazing. For example, I’ve told the story of how strategically managed cattle provide a safe haven for endangered migratory grassland birds in Mexico, and, across the globe, brought rural villages in Zimbabwe out of poverty. Yet the question nagged me: what can I do besides document what’s possible? I’m not about to reinvent myself as a rancher (though I did spend a week at The New Cowgirl Camp and we hosted four sheep for a summer). I don’t see myself digging swales to slow down water or traveling to remote areas to plant trees. Ultimately, I’ve decided to take my own advice, what I tell people who ask me how they can contribute to earth healing: Start where you are.

Where I am is on ten-ish acres on the west slope of Mt. Anthony in the southwest corner of the state. Like much of Vermont this land was once a sheep farm, since reverted to second or third-growth forest. There are some meadow-y areas that look natural and rather pretty, although once you’ve noticed multi-flora rose, Morrow’s honeysuckle, Asiatic bittersweet, and the like, you can’t unsee them. Where I have some agency is with biodiversity: I could help create the conditions for more plant, insect and bird life to thrive. My focus could be pollinators, the base of the food chain and pivotal to healthy ecosystems.

We know that pollinators are struggling. The plight of monarch butterflies and native bees has been in the news for years. In Vermont the use of herbicides known to harm bees has steadily increased on farms, lawns, parks, utility and transportation maintenance. Another threat is the insecticide class called neonicotinoids, which causes significant collateral damage. According to the American Bird Conservancy, a single pesticide-coated seed can kill a songbird. Habitat loss and fragmentation are other stressors. Plus, exotic, or introduced, landscape plants offer insects neither the nutrition nor refuge provided by the native varieties with which they co-evolved.

At first my regard for native plants was somewhat dutiful. I printed out a list of plants in their official Latin designations and went to my go-to place for vegetable starts. I found 4- and 6-inch pots that matched the inscrutable names on the paper. But was this a native plant or a hybrid bred for flower size or color? I knew this mattered, since ornamental cultivars may not offer sufficient food for insects, and can even confuse pollinators. I put the half-dozen plants I was certain about in my cart and called it a day.

But then I started looking. In late summer, when much of the goldenrod had grown taller than me, I thought, wait a second: some goldenrod plants have jagged leaves while some have leaves that are smoother and narrower. Down the hill I saw plants with sweeping yellow buds atop skinny foliage—those must be goldenrod too. In the shade I noticed small goldenrods with flowers arranged in a graceful arc. I’d always figured goldenrod was simply goldenrod, so ubiquitous and so sturdy that I never gave it a thought. I cued up my plant ID phone app and moseyed around the property. The varieties I’d seen were, respectively, Wrinkle-leaf Goldenrod (Solidago Rugosa), Giant Goldenrod (Solidago Giantea), Grass-leafed Goldenrod (Euthamia Graminifolia) and Blue-stemmed Goldenrod (Solidago Caesia). In all, within a short walk of the house I found eleven different types of goldenrod, including Early, Gray, Canada, Giant and Elm-leaved.

Asters, too: we have fabulously purple New England asters (Symphyotrichum novae-angliae), Heath Aster (Symphyotrichum ericoides), White Panicled Aster (Symphyotrichum lanceolatum), Calico Aster (Symphyotrichum lateriflorum), and, visible from the front steps, a broad expanse of White Wood Aster (Eurybia divaricate). I tested myself on identifying them all, and found a few more types here and there. Clearly, our native plants were more varied—and more interesting—than I’d imagined.

I’ve long loved spring ephemerals, woodland flowers like bloodroot and trillium that take advantage of direct sunlight before the trees leaf out. Bloodroot (Sanguinaria) shows up first: delicate white-petaled flowers swaddled by pale green leaves, as if in a hug. Come late April I was scanning the premises for bloodroot, like on a safari.

As the land woke up this May, something strange happened. I started seeing plants native to this area that I’d never seen before: Goatsbeard, Frosty Hawthorne, Waxflower Shinleaf, Golden Alexander, Agrimony, and the evocatively-named Eastern Enchanted Nightshade. At the edge of my vision I’d pick up an unfamiliar silhouette. It was as if I were drawing on a different sense, a kind of knowing that was somehow connected to my growing intimacy with the land. I’d check the app for the plant names, but the experience was less about documenting than about recognition, affirming something I already knew. I wondered: were these plants always here—or did they show up because I was paying attention?

I found a fine source for native plants, Wing and a Prayer Nursery in Cummington, Massachusetts. Started a decade ago out of concern for local bees, it has become a hub for people who like—and like to talk about—native plants. I make regular pilgrimages there, hanging out with the blooms, bees and butterflies and reminding myself to buy only as much as I can plant in a timely way. I choose a few large plants but mostly the far cheaper plugs, battling my own impatience to have fully established garden.

Where to put them? Over the years iris and lilies, which far pre-date my tenure here, have commanded much real estate in the large garden to the south of the house. These cultivated plants offer little ecological benefit, so in order to create favorable conditions for native pollinators—bees, birds, moths, butterflies—to thrive, I need to provide food and habitat that supports them. And so a typical summer afternoon would find me, with dirt on my jeans and hori-hori garden tool in hand, hauling out iris and lilies. It is hard not to be humbled by how robust these plants are, how primed to dig into the soil, to grow and spread. I don’t take lightly that I’m removing them from their home. I can only thank the plants for keeping us company all these years. And welcome their native counterparts back home.

– Judith D. Schwartz

Judith D. Schwartz is an environmental journalist and author based in Bennington. Learn more at www.judithdschwartz.com.

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