Letter from Austin Williams for Kentucky Heartwood

KENTUCKY HEARTWOOD Protecting the Beauty and Wellbeing of Kentucky’s Native Forests December 11, 2018 To friends and allies, new and old, Perhaps because I am not religious, I’ve been lately taking refuge in seeds.

Bear with me.

At the dissection bench I’ve found that seeds grant me some of the same satisfactions that I imagine the study of religious precepts does. Seeds are, or at least can convincingly seem, discrete, indurate, non-negotiable; signifiers of the order of an ordered world of which I can glimpse only a part. Even the uncertainties that do pass through the hand lens or show between the forceps, or perturb the text, continuing the analogy, are softened because they are nested within a larger, extant knowledge which I am separated from only by my own ignorance. I may not know to which taxon and evolutionary lineage my latest collection belongs, but I know that those things are knowable. The mysteries are well in hand, somewhere, in the fullness of time. “Lean not unto thine own understanding,” as it were, and I pretty frequently need a nice long lean away.

But the world is not a refuge, and inconvenient, jagged uncertainty is the rule. In fact, most of the real work of the world is in negotiating the fundamental infirmity of everything without losing your grasp on what matters, or drifting into the absurdity of nihilists and doctrinaires. This especially describes the work of active citizenship in the defense and proactive, sometimes confrontational, pursuit of the integrity of the natural world. This is the goal Kentucky Heartwood has pursued for 26 years, and to which I am proud to add my own efforts, and to which I ask that you add yours.

This is a fundraising letter. It is my desire (me, Austin Williams, forester, naturalist, and seed enthusiast) that you give money to this campaign.

Why? Here are a few suggestions.

Perhaps out of philosophical solidarity: We believe in the full profundity of the public lands idea, and reject the notion that shared ownership of our National Forests is an ideological relic inappropriate to our fully economized and atomized age. We also reject and combat the dismissal of citizen input and objection in bad faith bureaucratic and technocratic processes. Public lands activism is democracy in action, and only becomes more important as public participation is legally curtailed.

Perhaps out of concern for the natural world at large: We necessarily, and deliberately, grapple with the issues in our purview in the context of the destabilizing climate, accelerating habitat loss, and widespread species extinction.

Unfortunately, the public land agencies are failing to recognize this larger context of their decisions. The (extremely fraught) rationale for clearcutting an old forest in 2018 is much the same as it was in 1992, when hemlock and ash were not careening toward functional extinction, climate breakdown was more abstract, and relatively little was understood about the importance of old forests as carbon sinks, or as necessary drivers of fungal diversity, et al. (Also the same in 1992 and 2018 is the Forest Service using stale arguments to push logging on thousands of acres in the Daniel Boone National Forest.)

Perhaps out of love for particular species and assemblies of species: Our work is increasingly informed by the needs of the rare, disjunct, and declining kinds of life found on public lands in Kentucky. There is unfortunately no shortage of examples, and the list is growing. We make and have made arguments on behalf of wood lily, blackside dace, sand hickory, rattlesnake master, snuffbox mussel, mountain camellia, Indiana bat, Fraser magnolia, and Kentucky arrow darter, all of which, and more, are threatened at present by neglect or assault. It would be natural to assume, and official rhetoric would suggest, that Forest Service decisions are consistently informed by the needs of

these species. It isn’t so. One illustrative fact, among many: While the Daniel Boone National Forest covers more than seven hundred thousand acres, it employs only one botanist. However, the national forest employs a wide suite of foresters, silviculturalists, forestry technicians, and timber sale managers.

Perhaps because you appreciate the tensions and complexities of human dependence on the forest for livelihoods and goods: With our Cumberland Ecoforestry initiative we are trying, broadly, to answer the question “Under what circumstances can truly sustainable forestry on private lands exist?,” and the countless more specific questions that follow. “Which portions of the existing forest economy are antithetical, and which potentially adaptable, to the best ends?,” and “What is the appropriate price of a foot of wood resulting from genuinely restorative forestry, and how do we get it?.” We are making good progress on these questions, and, interestingly, at exactly the same rate gray hairs are showing up on my temples.

Or, finally, perhaps you believe, as I do, that much of the destruction and decline that we lament flows out of ignorance of, and separation from, the natural world, and that there may well be a fundamental limit on voluntary citizen involvement in the protection and management of public lands if the present alienation from it is sustained: Our most recent initiative, Rise and Root Rewilding Project, aims to address this. The plain enjoyment to be had from a day of inquiry and play in the woods would be entirely enough reason for founding our new forest school. A romp outdoors is humanizing in a precious and unique way, and one led by a deliberate and patient teacher doubly so.

But I also take it as an article of faith that our world will be better, and the good things in it better defended, in proportion to the health of efforts like this one. Exploitation is downstream of apathy and ignorance. Good stewardship follows affection.

I began this letter by valorizing the seed as comforting monad, the easily defined thing-in-itself against which I have to construct no arguments, define or defend no values. Just clear away pulp and pappus as proxies for a day’s anxieties. Record the date and location of the collection, examine distribution maps. “Huh and “Hm” quietly to myself. Of course, this is only one description, one significance, and probably one that’s best not separated from my own idiosyncrasies, a small, oddly soothing way for me to engage with the wild I love without being reminded so much of the labor of defending it. Read it as you would a diary entry, or a little online oversharing.

But to close I ask that you also try this other description of the seed, which approaches closer to that larger significance of any life; the depth and partiality and contingency and strangeness and transcendence that both causes and makes worthwhile the uncomfortable ambiguity and conflict inherent to fighting for one vision of the land over another. Call it a final pitch to those, like me, susceptible to melodrama. And thank you.

[If you like, read the following paragraph aloud.]

Because a seed is also the fussy botanist tableau’s anti, a puzzle-box grenade that may dry and die on the rock or have its germination peccadillos satisfied and explode above the mould, upon the stage, for the slow, high drama of the forest. Blackgum, say, dogwood’s overgrown lumpen cousin, as seedling, as free sapling, now rudely overtopped by tulip poplar, reconciling to a long suppression, breathing more slowly, but now free in the drouth year, surviving the fire, foraging, spreading, flowering for the first time in sixty years, ah, now cut by the saw, felled over. But not before! Not before a wood duck, in preposterous mask, swallows a near dozen drupes, down the gullet and wing beats down the creek. The seeds pass, make good purchase, and what luck now, up through the gap made by the heavy ice, easy past holly, stealthy past poplar, years passing in tufts now, 20, 80, 100, 200, the saw men return, blackgum is not cut, grows on, the years in bundles, 400, 600, the knobby bole all full of voids, the voids all full of squirrels, well warm and well sheltered in the 707th winter, and not much noticing in the 708th spring that blackgum puts on no leaves, but marking fully that mulberry, in the new unfiltered light, is heavy with flowers.

Austin Williams Kentucky Heartwood