(Originally written for ENG 201, Environmental Literature, for Dr. Jim Watkins, on April 27, 2020.)
(Photo by Peggy Choucair, from Pixabay.)
In her chapter, “Hallowed Ground,” Janisse Ray illustrates the claim made by Aldo Leopold that human history is necessarily implicated within natural history. While this theme emerges throughout Ecology of a Cracker Childhood, in this particular chapter, Ray uses the red-cockaded woodpecker as a lens by which to understand the “cracker” lifestyle, in the same way that Leopold uses the oak tree to examine life on a Midwestern farm in his chapter, “Good Oak.” Further, Ray presents a form of writing that borrows from eco-biography in order to make sense of her human culture by examining an element of the proximate non-human environment. By utilizing this form of writing, Ray, much like Leopold, highlights the interconnectedness of human and non-human history and the ethical implications of that overlap.
Aldo Leopold establishes throughout his chapter “February — Good Oak” that human history and natural history are inextricably tied together. First, Leopold implicates this truth in his opening statement: “There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from a grocery, and the other that heat comes from a furnace” (Leopold 1). Here, Leopold cautions his readers against separating basic human needs of food and warmth from a landscape. In the following lines, he prescribes planting a garden and cutting one’s own firewood, claiming human connection with nature as the remedy. Also, notice Leopold’s wording: “a spiritual danger” (Ibid.). This language shows that the aforementioned danger is threatening to some non-physical portion of the human. The spirit, or soul, that Leopold hints at here is not platonic in nature, being completely separate from the physical realm, but directly affected by its relation to the non-human world. Aside from the introductory language, Leopold overtly ties human and non-human nature together in the body of the chapter through the sawing of the oak. The chapter is divided into 11 subsections, 8 of which represent one decade that the tree was alive, and simultaneously the amount of time it takes the team to saw the tree’s rings. At the onset of the sawing, Leopold begins to recall the most recent years—“it took only a dozen pulls of the saw to transect the few years of our ownership”—and slowly recounts natural and human history dating back to the 1860’s (3). By describing both environmental and cultural events within the rings of this oak tree, Leopold reminds his readers that there is no separation of the two.
(Oak Tree. Photo by RegalShave, from Pixabay.)
Janisse Ray accomplishes a similar task in her discussion of the red-cockaded woodpecker and the longleaf pine ecosystem. The way that Ray describes the red-cockaded woodpecker throughout the chapter is rich with overlapping commentary about rural white culture. While her comparison is subtle at first, it becomes overt in the sentence, “It was a working-class sort of bird, trying to make ends meet in a failing avian economy, depending on its clan, and in these ways and also in the way history binds it to place, it reminded me of my cracker kin” (Ray 155). Ray initially makes the comparison based on socioeconomic status, that the woodpecker is “working-class.” She similarly compares their appearance, that the red-cockaded woodpecker is humble in plumage, much like her lower-middle class relatives dress simply. Additionally, Ray remarks that the woodpeckers are extremely reliant on their clans for survival, which resonates with her upbringing in a family oriented environment. Most importantly, however, Ray notes that both this species of bird and her cracker kin are bound to place by history. The parallel that she highlights here is this: both the birds and people of South Georgia have been uniquely shaped by their historical interactions with the landscape (Ibid.). It is impossible to think of the red-cockaded woodpecker apart from old growth pine forests, and it is equally impossible to think of Ray’s cracker relatives anywhere except south of the fall line.
While the aforementioned sentence is the only place in the chapter that Ray overtly compares her kin with the red-cockaded woodpecker, it opens the rest of the chapter to similar comparisons. In describing the bird, she notes its trademarking tendencies: they are loyal to their clan and live in close proximity to one another, they are territorial to one tree once they have established a nest, they communally raise their young, they mate for life, and they are “social and gossip” with one another (153-154). The phrases that Ray uses here only lightly veil references of Southern culture. While these similarities may seem coincidental in nature, Ray includes them in order to reinforce a narrative that stretches throughout her work, that human and non-human relations to place are inextricably tied.
Not only does Ray draw parallels between the bird itself and her kin, but she also situates these similarities within a common backdrop. Ray quotes an ornithologist, Todd Engstrom, in the same chapter: “You have to spend a lot of time in longleaf to appreciate it… you have to see it at different times of day and of the year, different seasons, different weather. Then you understand what a truly extraordinary forest it is” (155). This idea of hidden beauty within an ecosystem parallels with Ray’s own description of the South Georgia landscape as a whole. Earlier in the work, Ray says, “My homeland is about as ugly as a place gets… Unless you look close, there’s little majesty” (13). The red-cockaded woodpecker and cracker people are equally bound by history to their marginalized landscape, and because of the tie between human and natural history, we are able to see the qualities of the landscape reflected in its endemic species.
(Red-Cockaded Woodpecker. Photo by Dominic Sherony, 20 Jan. 2017, Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0.)
While upon first reading, the chapter “Hallowed Ground” may appear like a nature essay, it is in fact also an example of an eco-biography. Ray uses the red-cockaded woodpecker as a parallel species to her kin, as previously mentioned, but also as a connection point with a part of her native landscape. Within the work Reading Autobiography, Sidone Smith and Julia Watson describe several subgenera of autobiographical works. Smith and Watson define eco-biographies as “narratives that interweave the story of a protagonist with the story of the fortunes, conditions, geography, and ecology of a region, and reflect on their connection (and perhaps its failure) as a significant feature of the writing” (Smith and Watson 194). The “Hallowed Ground” chapter serves as an important section, among other nature-focused chapters, in Ray’s entire work, connecting her story to the landscape around her. By highlighting the woodpecker and its endangered plight as a result of habitat loss, Ray portrays the complex, interconnected relationship that her people, and herself, have with the land. In some ways, as mentioned earlier, the cracker people are like the woodpecker, but those same people are also some of the perpetrators of habitat destruction. In the chapter following “Hallowed Ground,” titled “Poverty,” Ray delves more into the complex suffering of both the cracker people and their land: “it was easy to see that Crackers, although fiercely rooted in the land and willing to defend it to death, hadn’t the means, the education, or the ease to care particularly about its natural communities” (164). She goes on to mention how the social dilemmas of the South directly correlate to ecological issues. By writing in the form of an eco-biography, one which examines her landscape alongside her own story, Ray paints a portrait of South Georgia, blemishes and all, without either completely excusing or villainizing her people.
At the closing of the “Good Oak,” Leopold gives a summation of his rationale behind his account of the oak’s history:
“These things I ponder as the kettle sings, and the good oak burns to red coals on white ashes. Those ashes, come Spring, I will return to the orchard at the foot of the sandhill. They will come back to me again, perhaps as red apples, or perhaps as a spirit of enterprise in some fat October squirrel, who, for reasons unknown to himself, is bent on planting acorns” (Leopold 9).
This is why an interconnectedness of human and natural history is so important to both Leopold and Ray. By understanding the intersection of people with their landscape, whether it be oak for firewood or slash pine for paper pulp, we are better equipped to keep the relationship between the two mutually beneficial. In closing her book, Ray notes her desire to restore the junkyard behind her childhood home to an ancient version of the pine forest and says, “When we consider what is happening to our forests… we must think also of ourselves” (Ray 271). Ray shows us that in order to have a vision of the future that considers both human and non-human interest, you must first look backward at the ever interweaving “hodge-podge called history,” as Leopold put it (Leopold 8).
Works Cited
Leopold, Aldo. “February – Good Oak.” A Sand County Almanac, Oxford University Press,
1966, pp. 1-9.
Ray, Janisse. Ecology of a Cracker Childhood. 1st ed., Milkweed Editions, 1999.
Smith, Sidone, and Julia Watson. “Appendix A: Fifty-Two Genres of Life Narrative.” Reading
Autobiography, University of Minnesota Press, 2001, pp. 183-207.
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