‘What radicalized you?’ is a question that circulates online spaces from time to time, usually followed by some moment or realization that laid bare for the subject in question the purported true nature of things, usually capitalism but not always. As a self-professed political radical on many fronts I do have a story- or rather, quite a few stories- along those lines, and perhaps I’ll tell one or more of them here one of these days. But as I’ve come to appreciate more as I grow older and, perhaps, wiser are moments and instances in which realities about our world come into sharper relief, not necessarily for the first time, but in new and startling ways that are deeply present to me as a person. The word ‘radical’ is of fourteenth century origin, having then meant ‘originating in the root or ground,’ or when applied to the body meaning ‘vital to life,’ the English word coming from the Latin radicalis, ‘of or having roots,’ itself derived from the Latin radix, ‘root.’1 Appropriately then the story I’m about to tell you here has a great deal to do with trees in a particular place, rooted—until not rooted—and with human beings and their ties and traces with and upon the same place. This is a story about politics—namely, the hidden deformations worked upon land and water and upon the landscape of memory and of love—but it is more about a series of personal revelations getting to the roots of things, realizations that go beyond the political into much deeper and deeply rooted terrain.
But it is primarily a story about trees, specifically the bald cypress tree.
i.
My people on both my mother’s and my father’s side come almost entirely from a single county in east-central Mississippi, where they have dwelt more or less continuously (at least until the last couple of decades) since the 1830s or so, having proceeded like many other Euro-Americans of the time progressively south and west down the ocean-facing side of the Southern Appalachian chain, following the creeping dispossession of Native peoples as the nascent American state flexed its power and domain ever westward. But whereas many of that same stock of people kept moving, crossing the Mississippi River and continuing ever westward, my people stayed put, along the rich grasslands of the Black Belt or in the more forested hills and bottomlands west of the prairie. My maternal grandparents settled themselves alongside Tallahaga Creek; my grandfather has spent virtually his entire life first on one bank, then the opposite. As a boy I spent many days exploring the creek’s bottomlands and neighboring hills, piecing together the long natural and human history of the place, from the recent past of my own family (a rusting old portable sawmill, a house built by hand by my great-grandfather and now a nursery for turkey vultures) down to the much more distant past of Native peoples. The latter were revealed in the abundant artefacts—scrapers, unfinished points, flint chips, and probably things my boyish eye did not recognize—I would find in the freshly plowed field that topped a hill near the bottomland, a still flowing spring emerging in-between.
The creek itself and its hydrology also bore the strong traces of the relatively recent past. Like many watercourses in the northern and central part of Mississippi, Tallahaga had been channelized in the mid-twentieth century by the Corps of Engineers. Its once sinuous meandering curves, arcing and winding along a broad rich alluvial plain which it periodically flooded, had been reduced to an arrow-straight ditch. Parts of its floodplain are now completely high and dry and cultivated as pasture land. However even with channelization parts of the bottomlands remained wet and swampy, including the land abutting my grandparent’s home. My pawpaw’s lower pasture was almost always wet, laced with creeks and boggy patches, while the bottomland forest against which it edged was kept in business by a smaller creek flowing into the Tallahaga and by the remnants of Tallahaga’s old course, now abandoned sloughs, forest-enclosed ponds that still overflowed their banks and flooded the forest around.
As a boy I explored up and down that bottomland, from the southern edge—Young’s Crossing Road divided the bottomland off from the dry pasture to the south— as far north as my legs would carry me, though I tended to stay relatively closer-in. Bottomland hardwood forests, even when mostly dry and not flooded, are slow-going, and it is easy to get turned around. Oxbow sloughs, winding creek courses, dense thickets of holly and pawpaw tree, steep clay banks, all are features that arrest movement. The fearless water moccasin, also known as the cottonmouth, is a regular inhabitant of this sort of landscape, and more than once I nearly stepped on one of these pretty decently poisonous snakes. Animal hazards aside, I loved those woods: every spring we’d come down and I’d go out to find the trillium coming up along the margins of the bottoms, where the land rose just enough. I’d wander out into the groves of pawpaw trees and imagine in their deep shadows I was in a rainforest. But in particular there was one blackwater slough I especially loved, because in and around its forbidding (to humans at least, not to amphibians and snakes!) water grew the largest bald cypress trees in the entire bottomlands. One in particular was of especial girth, partially hollow, and quite possibly predating the clear-cutting these forests underwent in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. I loved that tree and that cypress slough; at some point in elementary school I even wrote a poem about it, which somehow ended up being published in a newspaper as part of a children’s nature poetry feature or something—my first publication, in fact.
I don’t know how anyone can not love bald cypress trees, they’re just absolutely incredible, it’s hard to find the right superlatives. They feel old, even young trees just starting out; even if you didn’t know that genera and species quite similar to the Taxodium of today existed way back in the Cretaceous you wouldn’t be surprised to learn as much. From the mysterious knees rising from the water and the swampy soils, to their vast flaring trunks often hollowed, to their deciduous needles, they’re endlessly fascinating, and each tree has its own distinct character, more so than just about any other species of tree with which I’m familiar. I’ve met and known many bald cypress trees in the years since my childhood, from patriarchs of blackwater rivers on the lower Coastal Plain to those here in my current home of Maryland, the northernmost outliers, but that bald cypress and its close neighbors were my ‘ur-cypresses,’ their roots crossed with my roots, their ancestors’ ecological work lent life to my ancestors.
ii.
Time passed, and my trips back to Mississippi diminished as other responsibilities and concerns pressed upon me. Most of my trips back to my natal land were relatively short. My paternal grandmother died in the spring of 2020, but thanks to the draconian anti-covid policies in place at the time she received no funeral, only a graveside, and I could not travel down for it. When my paternal grandfather died last year, however, I was able to travel down, and later our entire family made it to Mississippi, my children for the first time. During my brief sojourn for my grandfather’s funeral last year one afternoon that weekend I walked out along Tallahaga Creek, looking for my bald cypress. I couldn’t find it. It’s not there anymore.
We walked up the dirt track that runs alongside the creek, scanning the forest off to the left, until we came to a sudden shift in the forest: at some point in the last few years the landowners (my family’s tenure only runs up to the edge of the bottomland) had part of the bottomland forest cut, (further) ditched, and planted in pines. What had once been rich bottomland hardwood forest, laced with creek and slough and bald cypress stands, is now basically dead. My favorite bald cypress and all the other trees and plants that once grew around it are now gone.
Pine plantations are ubiquitous across the American South. They are usually ecological wastelands: the trees are grown primarily for pulp, and so are grown fast and thick with minimal intervention beyond eventual thinning, then clearcutting. As the trees mature the canopy closes entirely, the forest floor becomes completely chocked with pine straw, and virtually all other plant life is extinguished. Native pine forests well managed are verdant, park-like places; a mature longleaf or, further north, loblolly pine forest that has been regularly burned and is not overly-dense is an ecosystem like no other, beautiful and rich in other organisms. Pine plantations are the opposite. Like so much of the rest of industrial agriculture they conform to machine logics, to the regime of fossil fuels, without which they would be impossible. They blanket much of the South, marching over landscapes increasingly devoid of human beings, themselves lost to the intractable logics of global capitalism and the centralized state. The loss of my landscape of memory is but one very small casualty in the seemingly endless onslaught and reworking of the world for the sake of industrial capitalism.
None of the realities underlying that loss were new to me, of course. My journey to ‘ecological radicalization’ was spurred by, among other things, my reading, many years ago now, Wendel Berry’s classic work The Unsettling of America. But in finding that a beloved forest from my childhood had been replaced by yet another dreary pine plantation, that deepened my realization, my awareness, and my urge to do something, anything, even if I do not fully know what that is.
iii.
The mid-twentieth century channelization revealed, some twenty feet or so below the level of the ‘modern’ alluvial plain, exposure of the Paleocene formation that underlies much of this stretch of Mississippi, and which in a few places have been strip-mined to get at the fossilized forests beneath. As the late Cretaceous seas receded under alluvial pressure, the rainforests of the Paleocene washed down towards the new sea edge and accumulated in deltas and floodplains, quite possibly with ancestral Taxodium included. The vast beds and seams of lignite—partially mineralized trees and other vegetable matter—now crop out in Tallahaga Creek, and as a boy I would sometimes find petrified wood and chunks of fools gold—pyrite—though I rarely thought much about them. Even in adulthood it barely registered with me until quite recently, this last summer in fact, that the earth beneath my ancestral lands had their own deep history and that it might be visible to some degree. The roots of the land and of its inhabitants run deep indeed.
It is easy enough, particular in moments of bitter realization such as finding a hallowed landscape from childhood ravaged by capitalist forces, to feel despair, to foresee in the future worse and worse outcomes, the fossil-fueled machine insatiable in its appetite even as climatic change plays havoc with our lives and economies. Such a scenario may well come to pass, but it’s worth keeping in mind the deep roots of things, roots beyond any human’s power to destroy or even to really know. The world is always charged with the grandeur of God, and the grandeur precedes and will post-cede all human deprivations and hubris and neglect. That is not to advise throwing our hands up in quietism. Rather, if we are to forge a world in which rich bottomlands are not regularly turned into dead pine plantations, we must cultivate landscapes of love and care, we must inhabit those landscapes and know them, bring ourselves into conjunction with the long human histories that have come before, and see ourselves as recipients of gift, of divine grace and creativity, expressed in the vast and marvelous riotous story of life on earth.
I have little doubt that one day—perhaps in my children’s lifetimes, or, God willing, the lifetimes of my grandchildren or great-grandchildren—Tallahaga Creek will overtop its channelized banks, and the life of the bottomlands will return, inexorably, with or without human care and attention. The creek will meander and wander and spread rich soil over the alluvial plain, and new sloughs will form, new oxbows atop the old traces. New bald cypresses will germinate and grow and wax old and venerable their roots sunk down in the waterlogged land, knees reaching up to heaven. Perhaps my descendants will see and feel them and be inspired by them to write poems and dream dreams of the bottomland and its deep rooted secrets, and so find their own roots and vitalities.