The Optimist’s Profession

I often ask myself why I chose to pursue a career in such a depressing subject area.  I could have gone the doctor route – a worthy career that helps people and yields almost immediate gratification.  I could have paid off my student loans by now had I chosen to be a financial consultant.  I could have been a CPA, formed an LLC, or created an INC by now – all paths that would have possibly been more lucrative and surely more optimistic than the path I have chosen.  No my friends, I chose the most depressing career path of them all.  I chose to be an ENVIRONMENTALIST. 

Everyday I wake up to depressing headlines, like the ones last week:

“Nearly half the systems crucial to the planet compromised.” Science Daily.

“It's Official:  2014 Was the hottest year on record.” NPR.

“Plan to save Monarch butterflies backfires.” Science Magazine.

And everyday I have to ask myself, “Why did I chose this field?”

For me, it all began on long drives through the Georgia countryside to and from soccer practice.  I was nine and angry.  Every Tuesday and Thursday my parents drove me on the back roads to get to a 6pm soccer practice on the other side of the county, and every Tuesday and Thursday I noticed more clear-cutting and more development than the week before.  In the 90’s Henry County was one of the fastest growing counties in the nation, and I was a nine-year-old who hated change.  Two years prior, at the ripe age of seven, I was reported to have cried for a week when my parents sold our old brown couch.  Change was an unconscionable travesty, a sin against humanity itself!

However, it was not just the change that upset me, but it was something more.  And it was that something more that made me an environmentalist.  In my nine-year-old mind, I had definitively concluded that people did not know what was best for nature.  After years of playing in my backyard, I had realized that nature was perfect and we only a small part.  Nature functioned fine without our help.  She was beautiful and perfect just as God made her, curves and all.  In summary, I became an environmentalist, because I trusted nature more than I trusted people.

Although I cannot speak for all environmentalists, I feel as though many of us were likely shaped by similar motivations.  What more is an environmentalist, than a defendant in the trial of man versus nature?  We might be motivated by different issues, but somewhere we all identified a problem in which man miscalculated his governance to the detriment of his fellow man, to nature, or both.  And somewhere along the way we may have asked, “Does man know best?”

Although a depressing profession, the environmental profession is filled with optimists.  It has to be.  Waking up everyday to dire environmental news requires patience, humility, and an optimistic spirit.  Arguably some of us in this profession may also be mild masochists as well.  However, I believe most of us our fueled on the small victories, the hope of a better future – no matter how bleak the probability of its coming to fruition. 

Admittedly, nere’ more is my ire conjured than at the site of a clear-cut forest that is zoned for a subdivision development.  My environmentalist soul is set afire and somewhere inside me a gnashing of teeth occurs.  However, also inside me past the anger is hope.  Getting past the anger is important, and those of us who have chosen this field as a profession know this truth.   Together we have to be hopeful and carry each other.  We will look to our community of “believers” - our neighbors, our friends, and our colleagues – and we will uplift one another on the many bad days, as well as the few good ones. 

Being an environmentalist is not easy, but convincing others to join our ranks is even harder.  Being an environmentalist means no longer being blissfully ignorant, or selectively unaware of where our food comes from, our energy, and our water.  It means admitting that we as a human species are too prideful.  It means acknowledging that we were wrong.  Who would enter a profession that inflicts so much abuse on the ego?  (Again, I reiterate that environmentalists may be slightly masochistic.)

So how do we inspire new environmentalists?

I propose two small solutions, and I hope you will join with me in the conversation to develop more.  My solutions:  Make space for the environmentalist’s revelation, and change our messaging.  The environmentalist’s revelation is that moment when a person realizes nature’s value and a human’s carelessness.  This revelation stirs empathy and action.  However, a key component to aiding this revelation also involves being present with nature.  I propose that we take our neighbors and friends, especially the ones who think we are strange, out on a walk in the woods.  Calling all weird plant ladies and bird watchers everywhere!  By sharing our joys of nature with friends and neighbors we may be able to inspire the environmentalist’s revelation in others.  Only by being with nature can we truly understand her.  In nature we learn of her perfection and her vulnerability.  We learn that she is what sustains us.  In fact, nature is all that is sustaining us and all that ever has sustained us. Nature is a gift, and we are the receivers.  Let us not take this reality lightly.  

An environmental conversion is a hard sell, but it is an important one.  And every day we, as environmentalists, proselytize to the masses, hoping we can convince more to join us.  Many environmentalists take an alarmist approach using calamitous environmental headlines and statistics to motivate new converts.  However, we are opening a new chapter in environmentalism – a new chapter in which the world has been irrevocably changed by our human hands – and I believe, it is time to let our optimism spill over into our messaging.  Now, more than ever, we need more converts.  We need more people caring about the future of this planet, and we need to do so by giving people a reason to hope.  Of course there is a time and place for the alarmist approach.  However, empowering, optimistic messaging can also be the fuel of movements.  We are optimists in this profession; let our messaging begin to reflect our greatest hopes for the future of this world.

In closing I want to thank all my fellow environmentalists for being with me on this journey.  You are the reason I stay in this profession.   Conviction alone can only fuel the soul so much.   Community enables us to endure.  And so to all of you I thank you.  Working together we will weather the depressing headlines and the small paychecks.  But most importantly, working together I sincerely believe we will make a better world for the planet and ourselves.  Call me delusional, an idealist, and yes please call me an optimist.  Pessimism be damned!  

Red Clay - A Small Piece of Our Southern Selves

The red clay welcomes me home, like a tired old dog greeting a long lost owner.  Red is the color of the Deep South --  A pink, rosy undertone that colors the people and the land.   Crossing over from North Carolina to South Carolina, I am always amazed at the change.  Yellow undertones give way to red, a legacy of farming and cotton.  The spirits of topsoil, long since washed away, haunt the land and sing of an old time, a now ancient time. “This is home,” I say, each year ever more forlornly. Each year, I come home to find myself a little more out of place.  Ironic, as my heart  perpetually yearns for the strangeness that is Georgia, its people, and its land. 

I am caught between two worlds, trying to find my place.  I suppose as we all grow older, we come to a place when our worlds are torn.  Our hearts seeking home in new lands, while yearning for the places of our birth, the places that formed and shaped us.  However, this is not a story so much about me, as it is a story told through my eyes about red clay and the people it creates, the people of King Cotton, Coca-Cola, MLK, and Jimmy Carter – the strange mix of people, which constitute the fairytales of Faulkner.  And so we begin with how the “dust of the ground” breathed life into the Georgia people.

Red clay does not escape any child of the South.  Our parents cursed it if their car tires got caught in it, and our parents cursed it still when it stained our white t-shirts.  It tested the sanity of many mothers, and was the source of joy for many toddlers.  However, I often wonder what this land was like before there was red clay, just as I wonder what the sunsets were like before air pollution.  The way we perceive the world, and the very world itself in which we live, is strangely shaped by our hands, and the hands of the men before us.  There are few acres of the world now, untouched by us. 

However, before I indulge my ponderings of red clay, I want to point out how few of us still play in the dirt today as adults - without cursing it.  For many of us, somewhere between the ages of 11 and 15, an unspoken rule of adulthood told us that we could no longer play in the dirt.  For some of us, who played collegiate sports, we got a “pass” to play outside in the dirt until we graduated college.  However, there are, what I consider the “lucky ones,” the people who get a “lifetime pass” to play in the dirt, the farmers and researchers.  When you consider the numbers, 2% of the U.S. population are farmers.[1]  If you add a few percentage points for researchers, we are looking at roughly about 5% of the U.S. population still plays in the dirt for a living.     

So, I ask to the small number of people in the U.S. who study dirt for a living, what was my Georgia like before red clay?  How would my identity as a Southerner be different? 

In the beginning God did NOT say, “Let there be red clay.”  Rather he likely said, “Let there be topsoil.”  Yes, there has always been red clay.  However, red clay’s original home is as a subsoil, not a topsoil.  So before there was the red clay as we know it today, there was topsoil, lots of it.  According to Stanley Trimble, an expert on the subject of soil erosion in the Southeast, at the original onset of European settlement the topsoils of the Southeastern Piedmont likely consisted of dark mature bottomland soils[2].  Of course, this made the mouths of colonial farmers water, and it was not long before the Southeastern Piedmont soil was met with plow.  And so the erosion began, and the red clay beast that lay beneath would soon, over the course of the next 200 years, begin revealing itself to the people above. 

From the colonial era to 1970, average soil loss in the Southeastern Piedmont was as follows:  Alabama – 7 inches, Georgia – 7.5 inches, South Carolina- 9.5 inches, North Carolina - 5.5 inches, and Virginia - 5.5 inches.  Although a matter of inches may seem negligible to most, farmers everywhere know that is A LOT of lost topsoil.  To give some context, root zones of many herbaceous plants and crops extend approximately 6 inches or more beneath the ground.  Therefore, to lose 7.5 inches of topsoil has critical implications for crop production.  Furthermore, losing 7.5 inches, depending on the depth of existing topsoil on site, may very well mean losing ALL your topsoil.  Furthermore, Trimble’s research revealed that the rate of soil erosion occurred most drastically with row crops of cotton, which further explains why Georgia and South Carolina experienced some of the largest losses of topsoil.  This phenomenon also explains why there is such a drastic change when crossing over from North Carolina to South Carolina, an almost immediate transition into red clay territory. Trimble’s figure below, which I overlayed with the route of I-85 may help you see what I see on my route home from Hillsborough to Atlanta. 

 

Red Clay Highway (AKA I-85)

According to Trimble, the tragic loss of topsoil in the Southeast has slowed in the last few years as a result of a decline in agriculture, the transition of former farmland to forestland and pasture, and strong soil conservation measures.  However, Trimble’s research, originally published in 1974, falls short of taking into account the booming population growth of the last few decades and its effect on land use.  Development of farmland for residential, business, or industrial use has now become one of the urgent matters of our time with regard to soil management. However, I promised you a story about red clay, so let me focus.

Now I have explained why we have red clay, but how has red clay affected our identity as Southerners and Georgians?  Of course, I cannot speak for all of you, and I may make some leaps here, but please bear with me.

Red clay signifies two fundamental realities of the Southerner: a strong agricultural legacy and an intensive use and abuse of the land.  The agricultural reality of our nature explains the Southerners’ love of country music and tractor references.  It explains Jimmy Carter, a peanut farmer from South Georgia, and it also explains Martin Luther King Jr, the grandson of a sharecropper, who lived and is buried a few miles from my childhood home in Stockbridge, GA. 

Now let’s briefly take a strange jump here and talk about what country music concerts say about identity with regards to our agricultural past.  Again please bear with me. 

Country music concerts provide an intriguing and entertaining look into southern culture.  Concert-goers dress in cowboy boots, flannel, and jorts.  The trucks in the parking lot are often spotless, and Budweiser is the obvious, and possibly, only beer of choice.  Furthermore, almost every other song at a country music concert is loaded with farming references.  At a recent concert, I looked out on the crowd of jorts and Budweiser cans and asked myself, “How many of these people are actually farmers, or children of farmers?”  Knowing fully well that only about 2% of the population are farmers, I deduced my answer:  not many.  So why the fascination with country music and tractor references?  It is not because many of us are farmers, it’s because the generations before us were farmers.  The South has historically been an agricultural economy, and it will hold on to that identity I imagine for years to come.   Of course to identify as a farmer is not a terrible thing, in fact it is a very good thing.  We need to hold up our farmers more!  However, it’s how we identify with our agricultural past that can be very good or very bad.  Let me explain.

The abuse of the land – the second reality that red clay signifies for the Southerner.  Just as MLK Jr, can be linked in his past to agriculture, he can also be linked in his past to abuse in agriculture.  In Trimble’s research, I want to highlight two points that led to the erosion of Southeastern Piedmont: cheap land and cheap labor.  Land was cheap when colonists first settled the area, so rather than staying on one parcel of land for years on end, farmers often used up a parcel of land until the soil was exhausted and moved to the next.  This phenomenon had severe implications for the erosion of topsoil of the Piedmont.  However, this problem was likely confounded when cheap labor entered the picture.  Trimble also found that higher soil erosion was correlated with slavery and plantation economies.  To conclude, it seems as though abuse of people and land resulted in the worst kind of abuse on the soil.

As a Southerner and an environmentalist, I have tried to more profoundly understand why the South, and Georgia, exists as it does today.  Because although the Civil Rights Movement and other great social movements have taken place here, the South still seems to remain stuck in its ways, maybe stuck in place by the very red clay that constitutes its being.  When I enter into Georgia and see that red clay, I am overcome with nostalgia, but I am also overcome with a sadness for what could be.  The South continues to have some of the most regressive social and environmental policies to date.  Many of the southern states have laws that very strictly limit unions, and its agricultural economy relies heavily on migrant labor, a term often considered slavery by another name.  A map of the U.S. will reveal the least number of environmental regulations in the South.  It will also reveal high poverty rates, as well as obesity rates. 

No I cannot directly link red clay to all of these realities I mention above, but I cannot help but think that the historical abuse of the land and its people has something to do with where we are today.  How would it have been different, if in the colonial period we had placed a higher value on our land for all its preciousness? Would we have the problems we have today? There is no denying it.  Red clay is our identity, but it does not have to continue to be an oppressive one: one heavy with the sins of our past.  We, as a Southern people, have the ability to move beyond this past. I do not call on you to denounce red clay.  In fact, I call on you to embrace it.  Because it is only by embracing our hurt that we can heal.  I ask you to please heal with me. 

Healing will be a long process, but not impossible.  I propose a few solutions below.  First, it is important to note that the healing has already begun.  Soil conservation policies over the last few decades have helped to slow erosion of our farmland soils.  However, the challenge now is, as farmers to embrace new practices, such as no-till, to continue to rebuild the soil of our making.  We are only as strong as the soil beneath our feet - the Dust Bowl is evidence of this truth.  By embracing practices that build our soil, we build ourselves up.  As small homeowners, we can do this too.  Put down compost and mulch in your yard.  Plant flowers.  Please, play in the dirt again!  The only way we can heal is if more of us go back to playing in the dirt.  In our past, as many as 72% of us were farmers.¹  We are people of this earth, let us go back to it, or, at the very least learn to respect it again.  Southern policy makers, please limit development on prime farmland.  According to the American Farmland Trust and the NRCS National Resource Inventory Report of 2010, we are losing more than 1 acre of farmland a minute to development, and we need this land for the future of food production.[3]  Please fight for innovative ways to increase revenue that does not depend on the property taxes collected from the development of new property on farmland areas.  If we keep developing on farmland, I suppose one day there will be no farmers and no country music.  Maybe this is what Southern policy-makers want, but I don’t – and I imagine a lot of Southerners would be enraged without their country music and tractor references. The population of this world is not getting smaller, and we need to feed more people every day.  Please save our farmland.

So I ask you to please heal with me.  As Southerners we can be a fiercely prideful people.  However, let us renew our pride by very literally going back to our roots and our soil.  Working together we can rejuvenate our soil and our people.

As for now, I will continue along my red clay highway. 

Georgia red clay carry me home.

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[1] “Farm Population Lowest Since 1850’s.”  NY Times.  July 20, 1988.

[2] Trimble, Stanley.  Man Induced Soil Erosion of the Southern Piedmont.  Soil and

            Water Conservation Society.  Ankeny, Iowa.  1974.

[3] Farmland Information Center.  http://www.farmlandinfo.org/statistics