Metro Pulse/Pulp/W. H. Hudson, Janisse Ray

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Two writers plead for the maintenance of the wonder of nature

by Jeanne McDonald

I grew up in a house that sat on the banks of the Elizabeth River in Norfolk, Va., only an hour's drive from the ocean. The river is off Chesapeake Bay, which means that it is a saltwater river, governed by tides and swarming with marine life. The days my sister and brother and I spent drifting in our little rowboat, exploring the muddy cove behind our house, were idyllic. I can still smell the salt, I can still feel the burn of summer sun on the part between my pigtails, I can still hear the slap of the current under the concrete bridge that led into the channel, where we were forbidden to go without our parents.

Years later, when I moved to Knoxville, I traded my sea-level flatland for rolling hills studded with rocks and trees. I remember reading at the time—in the telephone directory, I think—that the greatest local commodity was trees, and I was happy with that exchange. At 13, I had read W. H. Hudson's Green Mansions and had since been haunted by the character of Rima, a girl of the forest, and by the animistic theme, the attribution of conscious life to nature. And I had never met a tree I didn't like.

Last month at the Southern Festival of Books in Nashville, animism ruled. Peter Matthiesson talked about saving the Everglades, David Brill extolled the benefits of living in the woods, and Wallace Kaufman and Janisse Ray got impassioned about the desecration of our natural world. Ray, author of Ecology of a Cracker Childhood (Milkweed, $14.95) plaintively reminded us that once we lose our natural environment to pollution and development, we lose touch with our very history. In her book, Ray interweaves her ecological observations with scenes from growing up in a Georgia junkyard, where nature—particularly the longleaf pine—softened the edges of a fundamentalist world ruled by a loving but bipolar father.

She's right, of course, to worry. A missing tree that was once a beloved fixture in our growing up feels like an amputation. A dried-up or polluted pond represents a kind of spiritual dehydration. "I drink old-growth forest in like water," says Ray. "This is the homeland that built us. Here I walk shoulder to shoulder with history—my history. I am in the presence of something ancient and venerable, perhaps of time itself, its unhurried passing marked by immensity and stolidity." Winner of the American Book Award, Ray likens the present ecological situation to a war: "We Southerners are a people fighting again for our country, defending the last remaining stands of real forest...When we say the South will rise again we can mean that we will allow the cutover forests to return to their former grandeur and pine plantations to grow wild."

Wallace Kaufman's thought-provoking book, Coming Out of the Woods (Perseus, $26), is also a memoir, convincing and beautifully written. His personal experience in the woods is recounted with humor and intelligence; and his apologetic confessions of adversely affecting his habitat to meet local regulations and to accommodate his own needs are touching. To live off the land, he has to amend the earth to plant a garden. To gain access to his property, he has to build a culvert. To save his vegetables, he has to battle animals that lived in the woods long before him. Kaufman, too, frets about our legacy. "The greatest threat to the environment," he says, "is not the day Rachel Carson feared when spring comes and 'no bird sings.' The greatest threat is that day when spring comes and there is no wonder."

In 1964, Kaufman's youthful idealism prompted him to buy 330 acres of unspoiled forest to protect it. But over the next 30 years, he realized that his original covenants for the property had failed to save nature from his neighbors. "Their animals hunted wildlife. They cut down buffer strips for their gardens...they let their washing machines drain detergents into the woods." Finally, after Hurricane Fran destroyed hundreds of his trees, he concluded that the material things that protect us from nature "are the things that allow us the widest communion with nature. Our ancestors knew," he says, "that if nature was ever to be a friend to humankind, they would have to command it to be so. We did not come from Eden, but we intend to go there."

I too want our forests to be here for our great-grandchildren. I want our streams and our saltwater rivers to be preserved for our great-great-grandchildren. And I want people like Janisse Ray and Wallace Kaufman to keep writing wonderful and enlightening books about why we should keep our world unsullied so that we can bequeath green mansions to all children, those already born and those yet unimagined.