A Conservationist Manifesto

Big Trees, Still Water, Tall Grass

Big Trees, Still Water, Tall Grass \ for Barry Lopez M aps tell me that my neighborhood of low hills and shallow creeks belongs to Indiana, a state bounded on the south and southwest by the Ohio and Wabash rivers, on thenorthwestbyLakeMichigan,andeverywhereelsebystraightlines. The lake and rivers mark real edges, where you can wet your feet or row a boat, but the straight lines mark only human notions, inscribed with rulers on paper. The soil knows nothing of those boundaries. Birds glide over them. Deer browse across them. Winds blow and waters flow through them. Thunderstorms rumbling by make no distinction between Illinois and Indiana, between Indiana and Ohio. Monarch butterflies laying eggs on milkweed plants in our meadows pay no allegiance to the state. Raccoons and coyotes prowl through our woods and fields wherever hunger leads them, indifferent to survey lines or deeds.Sandhillcranestracetheirlongjourneyshighoverhead,guided by the glint of water and the fire of stars. These wild creatures are oblivioustothenamesandborderswehaveimposedontheland.They belong to a grander country, one defined by sunlight, moisture, soils, and the tilt of Earth. For years I have aspired to become a citizen of that primal country, the one that preceded all maps. I find myself wondering how this regionlookedtwohundredyearsago ,beforeitwascalledIndiana,before it was parceled out by straight lines. How did the rivers run? How did the air smell? What color was the sky? What would an early traveler have seen in the forests, the wetlands, the prairies? Trying to answer those questions, Ispent the fall searching out remnantsoflandthathavesurvivedinsomethingliketheirpre -settlement condition. And they truly are remnants, for less than 1 percent of the territory that became Indiana remains in our day relatively pristine, unaltered by saws and bulldozers and plows. I’ll speak here of three suchplaces—DonaldsonWoods,LoblollyMarsh,andHoosierPrairie. For shorthand I use their names, in case you wish to go look at them for yourself. But these refuges shrug off all titles, for they belong to an order that is far older than language. They remind us of our original Caring for Home Ground 130 home. They give us a standard by which to appraise how good or wise, how beautiful or durable is the landscape we have made from the primal country. \ In 1865, just as the Civil War was ending, George Donaldson came from Scotland to a spot in southern Indiana near Mitchell, where he bought a stand of old trees, built a house he called Shawnee Cottage, and soon earned a reputation for eccentricity. What the neighbors considered most eccentric was that Donaldson permitted no hunting inhiswoods,nofellingoftrees,nocollectingofmushroomsorginseng roots. He didn’t clear any ground for farming, didn’t quarry stone for building, didn’t charge admission to visit his caves. He made no use of the land at all, except to walk around and admire it. What Donaldson set out to preserve was a scrap of the primeval forestwhichin1800 hadcoveredsometwentymillionacresoftheIndiana territory, but which by 1865 had already become rare. In two-thirds of a century, nearly all the forest had been cut, the prairies plowed, the swamps drained.No wonder the official seal ofIndiana features a man with an axe chopping down a tree (and a bison fleeing). One scientist estimates that between 1800 and 1870, settlers must have cleared away one and a half billion trees, an average of seven thousand acres per day. Most of those trees were never used, but merely killed where they stood by the peeling of a ring of bark around the trunks, after which the standing hulks were allowed to dry, then felled, rolled into heaps, and burned. For decades, the smoldering piles must have made the countryside look like a battleground. Earlier civilizations, from China and Mesopotamia to Greece and the British Isles, had stripped their ownlandoftrees,exposingthesoiltoerosionandextinguishingmuch of the wildlife, but none had ever done so at this dizzying speed. Resisting the advice of neighbors and the appeal of lumber merchants , Donaldson held onto his big trees. After his death near the turn of the century, a combination of good stewardship and good luck Big Trees, Still Water,Tall Grass 131 kept the woods intact until they were incorporated into Spring Mill State Park in 1927. The park map now identifies the sixty-seven acres of DonaldsonWoodsas“VirginTimber,”aquaintlabelthatjoinsasexual term for an unviolated female with an industrial term for board-feet. Measured in board-feet, many an...