Outside The Box

One of my favorite haunts as a child was a large stand of white pines on our grandparents’ farm. The trees were probably 30 years old at the time, and they formed a dense canopy which shaded the ground underneath. In the hot summer months, it was always cool under those trees, and quiet. The mass of needles blocked all the sounds which echoed across the valley and replaced them with a whisper on the wind, and where they fell to the ground, a thick, soft mat formed that was perfect for taking a nap, building a fort, or just sitting alone and beyond the scrutiny of adults.

The trees had been planted as a crop to be harvested, but to a child, they were a magical forest, dark and mysterious and inviting, and as we both grew up, my love of them grew even stronger. Adults also need places where they can escape the noise of the world and its scrutiny, even if that place exists only in imagination or memory.

There was some discord in the family after the grandparents had passed, and our dad decided to harvest the trees. Our mom thought they were beautiful, and nobody wishes to see a childhood dreamscape razed to the ground. In the end, it was decided to leave some of the grandest sentinels on the point for the sake of beauty and to reseed the next generation.

Dad was correct in harvesting those trees. The southern pine beetles were devastating pine forests all across the Southeast. White pines were more resistant to the beetle, but they were also beginning to fall, and when the beetles hatched from larvae infesting a sickened tree, the direction the wind was blowing that day determined where they would strike next. Ironically, it was the monoculture planting of stands of trees for harvest which accelerated the rapid spread of the pest.

I’m continually amazed at Nature’s resiliency. A forest now stands where that crop once did. It now contains a large variety of trees, including some healthy white pines and many other forms of plant life as well. It is home to an astounding variety of creatures, much more than once lived there. As I watched this new forest grow, I observed something else happening which underlines our struggle to understand the interconnectedness of the natural world.

When I was a child playing in the pines, a pileated woodpecker was a rare sight on our mountain. However, the pine beetles and other insects which thrived on the dead and dying trees were a feast for the once threatened species. Today we hear their calls and the tapping of their beaks almost daily.

I also saw those dead pines rescue a watershed. Some years ago, an impatient would-be developer built a road on a mountain where a road should never have been built, and in a ham-fisted way that was guaranteed to cause the soil to erode. At the bottom of his hill, enough silt washed down to cover a 3 ft. hogwire fence. He made no effort to mitigate the damage, but Nature took its course.

Almost all the big pines on his hillside died, and when a storm system blew through one spring, many of them fell. It was an incredible mess, at least in the eyes of the amateur developer, and beyond his ability to “fix.” This was a lucky break for the watershed, for within two years the rotting logs did what no amount of human effort could have accomplished. The logs formed natural dams for the silt. New plant life sprang up in the now sunny spaces once occupied by the trees. The erosion stopped, and the mountainside stabilized.

The mention of that hogwire fence brings to mind another story of ham-fisted humanity. Hogs have a long history in our mountains. Many families would have starved in the lean years of the pioneers without the dependable source of protein from domestic pigs that foraged on the abundant chestnuts that fell from the once mighty stands of the American variety which covered the Appalachians. Every part of the animal was used, and the rendered lard made soap, softened leather, and baked biscuits.

In the early 1900s, someone thought it would be a good idea to bring Russian boars to the southern highlands for sport and keep them on hunting preserves. Of course they escaped. Pigs are highly intelligent and resourceful. Once free, they continued to spread, and they bred with domestic pigs that foraged in the same hills.

The phenomenon is known as “hybrid vigor,” or “heterosis.” Sometimes hybrid species can exhibit enhanced traits, and such is the case with the hybrid pigs which now plague many a gardener and grass mower in the Southern Appalachians. The aggressive foraging of Russian boars has combined with the rapid reproductive traits of domestic pigs. The result is a highly successful hybrid: intelligent, adaptable, and unconcerned with the symmetry of your lawn or hayfield. The once abundant chestnuts which kept the pigs in the highlands and out of your garden are long gone.

In our valley, neighbors combine efforts to control the hogs. When the population of the herd grows large, they can plow several acres of land in a single day. Currently, our itinerant troublemakers are at a manageable level, but just yesterday I found where a pair had plowed a small wetlands at the head of our creek some time ago.

To the western eye which tends to define beauty with symmetry, the marks of a rooting pig, like dead logs rotting on the ground, would first appear to be ugly and undesirable. Yet in each pool formed in the soggy ground by our foraging foes, I saw thousands upon thousands of tadpoles. The frogs are celebrating the passage of our porcine pilgrims.

Nature takes whatever we throw at it and adapts. What we call “Nature” is systemic, symbiotic, and synchronistic in ways we still struggle to understand. In my experience, we do much better as stewards of Nature than we do as managers. As managers, we just can’t seem to fully comprehend all the subtlety and interconnectivity of the environment in which we live, and that understanding is often clouded or completely obscured by our desire for profit and our need to control.

Incalculable damage has been done by the passage of humans, not unlike rooting pigs in our understanding of the consequences of our actions. Now in our impatience at that lack of understanding of and inability to cooperate with Nature, we seek to control it instead, to alter it at the most fundamental levels, and, stepping into the role of the Creator, bend it to our own wills. Every time I read a GMO label, the Luddite in me takes note.

“Luddite” has inherited a derogatory meaning from the industries that movement sought to question, but the Luddites were not against technology. They were against technology for its own sake without consideration of the social, cultural, and economic consequences – the unintended consequences.

Nothing rolls with the punches and adapts to unintended consequences better than Nature itself. If you ask the frogs in our wetland, they will tell you that Nature will even work with a hog, so surely there is room for improvement in allowing it to work with us as well.