Of Things Lost and Future Possibilities
Some Concluding Reflections on the Environmental History of the Southern Appalachians
Over the last few months we’ve explored in these digital pages several aspects of the agro-ecological history of the American South, in particular our region, the Southern Appalachians. It is a vast and important topic, one that we can only begin to cover here, and one to which I’m sure we’ll return in the future. Besides the intrinsically interesting nature of this history (well, I hope you agree on that point anyway!), for those of us invested in imagining different, and, we hope, better futures for ourselves, our wider communities, and the landscapes and ecosystems within which we live, it is especially crucial to better know the history of the land and the living things inhabiting it. Part of the benefit of knowing this history—which, as we have seen and as I will stress in the first part of this essay, is a history of loss, displacement, and bitter ends—is simply knowing what once worked here, what we can know is possible because it was once the norm. For example, we have a great deal of evidence concerning the diverse agro-ecological systems that native peoples employed prior to conquest and colonization, such as their use of polycultures and encouragement of the bountiful margins:
For this reason, Mississippian agriculture was much more than the tending of a handful of individual crops. More accurately, it was a cultivation system embedded in a diverse and dynamic local ecology. Many edible foods grew in abandoned fields or along the disturbed edges of the upland forest. When in season, passion flower and morning glory roots as well as the fruits of the honey locust, persimmon, pawpaw, chickasaw plum, red mulberry, wild cherry, and scuppernong or muscadine grape might be gathered in large quantities. Likewise, the Mississippians prepared nutmeats of all kinds, including chestnuts, black walnuts, butternuts, hazelnuts, beechnuts, and chinkapins.
Any perennial food systems we might want to cultivate today should be informed by such history, and have recourse to existing native plants and long-established cultivars. There is also, I think, an ethical and spiritual obligation to remember the peoples and practices that came before us, that made our land and its living communities of non-human organisms what they are today. That work of memory can be very challenging, especially here in North America. It can also be rather mournful work.
For as you dig into the history of our region (and much of the rest of the Americas, we are hardly unique in this) you start to realize just how much has been lost, some, perhaps much of it, irrevocably. Even the most seemingly pristine landscapes, the most seemingly “intact” ecosystems, are missing major components: plants, animals, ecological interactions and keystones, and, yes, humans and human practices. In what follows, I will sketch a handful of these points of loss, of what is now missing from our Appalachian landscapes, often unbeknownst to most observers today. After these vignettes I’ll propose ways forward, how cultivating a memory of what is now absent can guide the world we nurture into being in the present and the future.
i. place names
Last week my son and I camped out at Smokemont in the Great Smoky Mountains and in the morning drove up to Kuwohi, the mountain I knew as Clingman’s Dome, its older name being reapplied to the mountain last year. It was his first time visiting the peak, while I have lost count of the times I’ve been up there over the last thirty-five years or so. We climbed the somewhat jarringly modernist observation tower and peered into the thick morning fog, then hiked down to Andrew’s Bald and back, the clouds lifting as we reached the parking lot, by then teeming with vacationers huffing and puffing up the asphalt path to Tennessee’s highest point. Along the way down to the bald we stopped to examine the imposing outcrops of the ancient Copperhill Formation, determining if perhaps one of them was the gateway to the great council house of the bears described in Cherokee myth. We did not see the White Bear, the leader of the bears’ council, but it would not have been too surprising to see him amble through out through the mist.
We know some of the stories associated with Kuwohi because, primarily, of the work of the late nineteenth into early twentieth century ethnographer James Mooney, whose magisterial book Myths and Legends of the Cherokee has been a fixture in our house, some of the stories related therein passing into our own family’s stock of campfire tales. But by the time that Mooney was collecting stories from often elderly Cherokee informants the stories and meanings associated with many place names even in the core Cherokee country were already lost. And the transmission of these names and stories down to us is even with such efforts of historical recovery a poor shadow of the vibrant world of meaning once maintained by placenames and the living tales and traditions associated with them.1
Here in and around Chattanooga the Cherokee were late-comers, arriving only in the eighteenth century, taking up settlement and cultivation in lands that had once been dominated by Muskogean and Yuchi speakers, traces of the former still audible in some of our place names, including that of Chattanooga itself. But most of the places names are now lost, and virtually no stories survive, none of the rich cultural meanings and uses that once existed legible to us today. The cultural landscape that wove in and out of the natural one, that encompassed the plants and animals and agricultural systems and hunting and foraging routes and practices, a landscape that was built up over hundreds, thousands of years, is today almost entirely utterly lost. At most it survives in brief glimpses, in garbled place names, in now inconspicuous structures like Chattanooga’s own Chickamauga Mound or in the mostly publicly inaccessible rock and cave art of Mississippian peoples (and perhaps further back), some of which lies not too far distant from where I sit and write. All had histories, stories, bound up with the living things and ecosystems around them, meanings that developed over time and which once lost can never be recovered again.
ii. the American chestnut
Walk most of the ridgetops in these mountains and if you keep your eyes open and know what to look for odds are good you will see remnants of one of the most spectacular lost species of the Southern Appalachians, the American chestnut. The story of the chestnut is, I think, pretty well known, but for those who do not know, briefly: by a certain point after the last retreat of the great glaciers the American chestnut became a dominant tree in deciduous and mixed forests up and down the Appalachians and their near hinterlands, from the southern edge of Maine to as far south as the last gravelly hills of South Mississippi. Compared to its Eurasian cousins it was a massive tree, and in a good mast year its crop of nutritious nuts could be absolutely immense. By the end of the nineteenth century many Southern Appalachian mountain families drew on the chestnut as a sort of insurance policy, its bounty potentially covering shortfalls in other staple harvests. It was a bulwark against the full penetration of capitalist market relations and domination, a source of resilience and autonomy.
Until, of course, the American chestnut was hit with the chestnut blight. Alongside the unprecedented circulation of goods, plants, animals, and humans that has been such a defining feature of modernity, pests and pathogens have jumped into the routes of trade and exchange that tie together every corner of the planet. The rapid global flow of pathogens might well rank alongside the exploitation of fossil fuels in terms of importance in shaping our world; like the carbon dioxide released by the burning of coal and oil and gas, pathogens and pests are all but invisible, registered in their effects, rapidly becoming ubiquitous, unstoppable.
The chestnut population collapsed with shocking speed, as the guilty pathogen radiated outward from its port of entry, felling centuries-old trees and resetting human and non-human ecological interactions and relationships virtually overnight. And not unlike the loss of the stories and meanings associated with native place names, traces of the chestnut have lingered on, reduced and deformed. Logs of trees that fell going on a century ago have not entirely decayed. The roots of the chestnut will often survive, more or less indefinitely, sending up several shoots which will grow for a while before being cut down by the blight, leaving thin skeletal markers to mingle with new, doomed growth. In my lifetime I’ve seen many such relict chestnuts, but only on a couple of occasions have I seen any that grew large enough to bear nuts. Most die back before being able to produce mast.
We—well, probably not me, but perhaps my children or my children’s children—may see the full return of the American chestnut, certainly there are people working on it and have been for some time. Who knows. But for now it is but one of the growing list of species, keystone and not so key, that have either vanished from our landscape or have been greatly reduced, mostly by introduced pathogens. In my own lifetime one of my most beloved trees, the eastern hemlock, has been devastated; ancient trees whose cool shade and immense bulk I treasured as a child are now thirty years later graying skeletons, or prostrate upon the ground, returning to soil like the ancient chestnuts a century prior. It may sound melodramatic but the ever escalating loss of the hemlocks feels like a part of me dying.
iii. ecosystems and assemblies
Finally, and most spectacular yet perhaps most invisible, entire ecosystems and large-scale assemblies of species have either disappeared completely or been reduced to tiny fragments, diminished remnants of once expansive wild and semi-cultivated landscapes. We have already seen allusion to the semi-wild polycultures encouraged by native agriculture in the South, and in a previous essay I introduced the outlines of native “food forests.” Since writing that essay I came across a tantalizing clue to another such managed wild assembly: black walnuts and pawpaws, which grow well together and, I suspect, were once encouraged to do so by native peoples of the South (and perhaps elsewhere within the closely overlapping ranges of these two trees). The drawing below was made by the German traveler Philipp Georg Friedrich von Reck (1710–1798) during his mid-eighteenth century journey through the then colony of Georgia, where he encountered Yuchi and Muscogee speakers and their lifeways. I have not been able to identify which native languages are represented in the drawings but his record suggests to my eye at least these two being treated as a cultural unit, perhaps cultivated in proximity to one another in another iteration of the native food forest. If so, European settlers did not retain that association, and in fact the pawpaw became a much more obscure fruit in the centuries following, only lately seeing something of a revival.
I already discussed the all but vanished giant river canebrakes, but they’re worth mentioning again. Like probably all of our native grasslands, the canebrake was an anthropogenic ecosystem, at least in part, and might better be described as an agro-ecosystem, like the ancient food forests that doubtlessly once covered much of the American South and beyond. It survived in a few places into the twentieth century, including, it turns out, among the Catawba Indians of South Carolina, who themselves had somehow managed to retain a tiny corner of their former lands. Because rivercane continued to play a role in Catawba life it was maintained, possibly through fire (other photographic evidence suggests the continued use of fire into the early twentieth century). But here too it was eventually lost, and, so far as I know, all currently existing pure canebrakes today are recent recoveries.
We come back to place names. “Cane” and “brake” or some combination thereof litter the map of the South, and those are just in English—no doubt many place names derived from native languages tell similar stories. The canebrakes are gone from those places, the species lingering on much as the toponyms have, reduced in nature, cut off from their original context and care. Whatever other cultural practices, stories, rituals, and so on that might have once been associated with such places and their names are also, for the overwhelming part, gone, forgotten with the landscapes that themselves have disappeared under the weight of settlement, industry, and the march of modernity.
iv. futures
What does this all have to do with us in the present? Well, in the first place I think we ought to recollect what was lost and mourn it, and pay suitable attention to the factors that caused these losses. Perhaps, in the great impassive logic of history, most of them were inevitable. Once humans conquered speed and distance, the unchecked spread of pathogens was all but guaranteed, with the great late antique and medieval plagues forerunners of what early modern and modern humans would realize as they crossed every ocean and trod every land. Whatever we may think the choices people in the past did or did not have, however their ethical or theological or political values or concerns should or could have guided them, we can still feel sorrow over what was lost, of what we are still losing to this very day and what we will with almost absolute certaintity still lose in the days to come.
But that is not all this history can teach us. Some of what is lost is irretrievable. The rich tapestry of human histories that had been woven prior to the fateful entradas of the Spanish and the later settlement regimes of other Europeans and their introduced pathogens, that tapestry can only ever be found again in little pieces and fragements, passed through the seive of the intervening centuries of loss and disspossesion and transformation. Formerly abundant species that were ecologically central, like the passenger pigeon or the Carolina parakeet, are gone forever, completely extinct. Even those that might recover one day, like the American chestnut, will probably never return to what they once were, the river has moved on and the ecological ground has shifted.
At the same time, there are things from this historical story that we can draw upon, that can inspire us in the agro-ecological futures we help to build. The species that made up old field and margin polycultures of wild origin and human use are still with us, even if in some cases they require more attention and tending to thrive than they did two or three hundred years ago. Our forests and scattered grasslands can act as productive and ecologically rich commons once again, and the names of plants and animals and of places can be known, can take on new stories and significances. We can come to be native to this place, too, and realize a new depth and richness to the landscapes we have inherited and which we can shape for the good.
Not everything is lost, and there is much yet to be saved.
While it is concerned with the particular case of Western Apache uses of place names, Keith Basso’s “‘Speaking with Names’: Language and Landscape among the Western Apache” (as well as other works of his on the topic) is a revelation in the ways in which native languages were—and, fadingly, still are in some places—able to contain vast amounts of meaning in toponyms and their uses in everyday conversation.