Growth and Disturbance, Good and Bad
Reflections from Two Valleys
There is a stretch of wide open land that lies between GA-193 and Chattanooga Creek, Lookout Mountain rising to the west, Hawkins Ridge to the east, the valley between extensively reshaped by human activity over the last century and a half but still retaining some rich alluvial areas, which historically would have been dominated by rivercane and grasslands, with the farms of native peoples perhaps dotting the area as well. Certainly a mix of anthropogenic fire and flames lit by “natural” causes would have helped to maintain open grasslands, here as in so many other places in the South and beyond. Today the rich floras of grasslands and open forests tend to be restricted to roadsides, powerlines, and the like, ignored and unvalued. This particular stretch was, until yesterday, a gorgeous sea of yellow and purple, bearded tickseeds and ironweeds dominating but with many other flowering plants and native grasses interspersed, all host to a vast array of pollinating insects and other creatures.
Today that same alluvial plain is a barren stretch of grass cropped as close to the ground as possible with the giant mechanical mowers the state highway department unleashed, neither caring nor thinking about the acres and acres of biodiversity, of beautiful life, they were ripping to tiny shreds, at the height of the late summer to early fall bloom. Someone somewhere had determined a schedule, and yesterday was the day to unleash the machines and “tidy up” the huge roadside, wreaking destruction as close to the hedgeline as the machines would allow. A few little corners, blocked by larger shrubs or logs or, in one case, old railroad tracks, discouraged the crews and survived unscathed. This afternoon the few remaining flowers in those refugium were swarmed with bees, butterflies, wasps, soldier beetles, and others, the scalped acres silent, a single tattered ironweed the sole survivor.
To be sure, most of the plants cut down at the height of blooming will grow back next year and bloom again, some of the insects and other creatures will have survived to find new patches somewhere, perhaps across the ridge in another similar stretch of grassland and savanna (which, however, is currently on the market for “development”). But the flowers will not return this year, and only a few would have managed to make seeds. The beautiful riot of color is gone, the insects are mostly fled, the small mammals and birds that made use of that habitat are gone. But drivers will have a blank expressionless canvas to ignore as they speed along, noticing nothing.
Just to the north over the state line and across Hawkins Ridge and Chattanooga Creek—which improbably jogs east through a water gap in the ridge and meanders through South Chattanooga before cutting west again to empty into the river—in another valley, hard against Missionary Ridge, is one of our nascent community food forest sites, located at a place called Ella Library. When we began working there, we didn’t have a lot to go on, literally—much of the property is dominated by an old parking lot, as impermeable a surface as you can get. So we’ve worked around and upon it. The margins, once grass or brushy vines, are now planted heavily with all sorts of things, some for human consumption, others for “ecological services” (a term I personally don’t really like—it’s akin to “human capital” in the taste it leaves in my mouth); to help demarcate our growing space and avoid direct hits from kids’ soccer balls kicked around on the parking lot, we built a wall with bays of old pallets, scavaged from hither and yon and assembled by volunteers, then painted by some of the kids. It’s a work in progress, but the transformation is already very visible, and seems to be working.
We had our weekly “garden club” Monday evening—kids from the neighborhood help do whatever tasks are needed that week, from planting seeds to watering to pulling weeds. This week we had about a dozen kids of various ages, all of Guatemalan background other than my kids, some of them “regulars,” my week in and week out gardening partners, others new to the forest garden. Fortunately there was plenty to do: I put in a new bed using soil and compost hauled up from our chicken run, which the kids planted thickly with peas, lettuce, and arugula, holding out their little hands and carefully cradling a few tiny seeds at a time then reverently putting them into the soil. We made the rounds of our garden, picking tomatoes—mostly volunteers from my compost—and whatever else was ready, admiring the massive gourds of different sorts trailing along the fence, turning up new insects and other creatures, checking on the worms in our wormery.
Our garden tasks done for the day, some of the children drifted inside to play Legos and read, others played happily in the food forest space and its recycled infrastructure. The bees and wasps and other little creatures whirred and buzzed alongside the chatter of children’s voices, the gentle sway of the wind, broken only by the occasional loud car or truck barreling down the street, past this refugium we’ve hewn and cultivated, a work in progress, one small dot but neither static nor utterly alone.
In the grand scheme of things, a state maintenance crew leveling a few albeit beautiful and rich acres of roadside grassland pales alongside any other number of things I could find to make me sad and depressed in today’s headlines, or out on the streets of my city. After all, no malice was involved, in fact I doubt anyone put more than a moment’s thought into it, or that more than a handful of other people will even notice what is missing.
Likewise, while wonderful for the children who visit our little library food forest and help cultivate an unpromising space, you could point out that outside this neighborhood, and the others in which we are working—all pretty marginal and unimportant as the world at large sees things—we’re not accomplishing much. So far we have not budged the levers of power; the great machine rolls on indifferent, the political and cultural maelstrom in which we all find ourselves in this country has not lost speed because of some fruit trees and woodchips.
And yet. When it comes down to it, the social world—which in the age of the apogee of (one aspect at least) human power and might means pretty much the entire biosphere—is made up of many small acts and choices made every day and every moment, its outer shape and direction sustained by the inner states and choices we all make, which our institutions and cultures and all the rest help to generate and regularize. How a field is treated, or whether children have a garden to tend and trees to enjoy, makes a difference in an immediate sense—because all beings, all people, have a sacred significance and value—and in the emergent, the aggregate, as pathways and choices that could have been otherwise.
The aggregate of all of these choices and routes taken leads to others and begins to lock in the results—pathway dependency—though never absolutely. Within the very dynamics of industrial modernity (and of other forms of human society past and present) are the spaces of rupture and regrowth, of possibility and of life. The role of disturbance—ecological and social and otherwise—is an apt example.
We are all products of disturbances great and small, and while this has always been true, the ecological, social, and other disturbances of the industrial age are unparalleled in scope and scape in previous human history. Disruptions that might have taken a whole season or an entire generation, or even an entire glacial cycle, to accomplish now take place in the course of an hour, a few years, a few decades. Our meadow of wildflowers might, in a previous age, have burned in the winter or been grazed by large herbivores, both forms of healthy disturbance, without which in fact biodiversity tends to plummet and living conditions for humans and for many other organisms degrade. What is novel today is the compressed time, the speed within which such disturbances are effected, our unlocking of fossil fuels giving us powers unlike any prior. Likewise, disruptions and disturbances generated by human politics and economic systems are nothing new—it is the speed with which they are effected, and the sheer global scale that breaks all previous patterns.
Out of all of the claims that have made up the insiduous campaign of deceit, rumor, and bald racism that has unfolded in relation to Haitian migrants over the last couple of weeks, one that is true is that migration can indeed lead to social disturbances and disruption in the communities where migrants settle, even if the results are often exagerrated and the full spectrum of dynamics ignored. What is usually overlooked of course is the reality that so much migration is driven by disruptions and disturbances in other places, all interconnected in a world of integrated industrial capitalism and entangled states. There are certainly people for whom the “pull” factor is paramount—a perennial minority of humans being dispositionally inclined to striking out to new places has been one of the keys to our species’ success, but the “push” is generally speaking more potent. From Southern sharecroppers setting out north to escape their landlords to contemporary peasants in the “Global South” watching their lands dwindle, their debts increase, and rural investment dry up, disruptions run the gamut from the gradual to the sudden explosions of violence, state-run and freelance.
But still—new inhabitants create disturbances of their own, necessarily. Whether these disturbances become opportunities for greater flourishing—as they so often are in ecological contexts—or lead to social unrest, diminished services, and intractable barriers and divides, ultimately comes down to how we all respond and what steps are taken to shape and resolve things. Perhaps it is an impossibly improbable and forced metaphorical stretch, but it strikes me that we can address both the social disruptions (of which immigration is but one, arguably pretty minor, one) and the ecological disruptions and disturbances simultaneously, that healing and transforming the landscapes of industrial capitalism with collective agroecology can do other things, too, even if it is just to model other ways of thinking and being in the world.
For if disturbance and disruption can be definite evils, they can also clearly be goods: the periodic disturbance of fire opening up the canopy or releasing the seed bank; the interaction of peoples from hither and yon, generating new identities and communities; the breaking into the world of God, the disruption of our patterns and mores through the inner revolution of grace and divine gift. The trick is recognizing the differences, and figuring out what to do with the destructive, even apocalyptic-seeming, disturbances and disruptions, how to counter them and grow within them, even against all hope.
I will be entirely honest: if I sit and think about what we are trying to do, in our little corners of Chattanooga and its immediate hinterland, and the headwinds against which we are pushing, it can be completely overwhelming. While there are some definite positive trends within our little metropolis’ culture and within the orientation and priorities of city government (if not yet all of the counties and other municipalities that make up the metro area), like everywhere we are dealing with a world that is structured against human and non-human life and genuine flourishing. Fossil fuel infrastructure, capitalist consumption, and mass engines of attention capture dominate the ground, both literally and metaphorically, here as everywhere. It is pretty cheap, all things considered, to mow down a meadow of beautiful wildflowers, and politically and socially expensive to keep them. Social fragmentation, persistent divides of inequity, bureaucratic turpitude, and all the rest both create the necessity for our work while also erecting the greatest challenges, tearing up the literal and metaphorical ground at home and abroad.
Gardening is not instant gratification, far from it, planting and tending perennials and entire agro-ecosystems least of all—but it is immediately tangible, and it quite literally grows, while growing other things in more metaphorical senses, but also in an increasingly tangible manner. Some of the success can be immediately quantified, the amount of produce harvested, the increase in soil health, the return of insects and other macro-organisms, the cessation of soil erosion. But a lot can’t be, at least not by us: the subtle shifts in how people think after being exposed to nature in a new and more meaningful way; the sense of peace and safety a garden can give to people without a surfeit of either in their ordinary lives; the small and gentle acts of love and healing as people work together and encounter one another in ways and places they might not have otherwise.
Ultimately, I keep going at this work not because I have some great confidence in my or anyone else’s efforts, nor do I have some naive hope in emergent technology or the looming revolution or whatever. I keep going insofar as I have faith in God, my hope rooted in the convinction that true power and might are not the stuff of grand schemes and balloning wealth, they are not the preserve of the might and the strong. The truth of things is in the weakness of the world, in the hidden currents of gift and love and life, known and unknown, within which God acts not as the captain of industry but as the hidden Spirit and Life of the world. In the words of St. Paul: “God hath chosen the weak things of the world to confound the things which are mighty; and base things of the world, and things which are despised, hath God chosen, yea, and things which are not, to bring to nought things that are.”
The inner truth of things is in the tiny seeds in a child’s hand; the truth of things is in the flourishing of the land after disturbances, the bursts of color and life; the truth of things is in the self-sacrifice of God upon the wood of the Cross, the Gardener Himself healing the disruptions of His creatures by offering Himself up within the very soil and tilth of His creation. This is the model we must follow, it is in gentleness and care, in attention to the weak and the small things of the world, that we work healing and transformation, and align ourselves with the Creator of all. What exactly this should look like when it comes to our care for the land, for what kinds of economies and relationships we work out—those things are not always obvious, but the direction is, and very often it will run counter to the prevailing currents. Thank God then for the small victories, the pockets of growth and love, and may their number increase!