If we are going to care about the environment and preserve natural spaces in the so-called “rust belt,” then we must love rust. We must practice terranexus and accept and even love the chaotic intersection of civilized and natural worlds.
By Eric D. Lehman
Many years ago, a companion and I parked our car at Indiana Dunes State Park Campground and prepared a tent site near the edge of the sloping sand. The dunes nearby were covered with stunted trees and shrubs and networked with trails, but we decided to leave them for later and drove a few miles to park at the base of Mount Baldy, a 123-foot-high dune in what was then the National Seashore. As we struggled and scrambled upwards, the smokestacks and skyscrapers of the Indiana cityscapes became visible and seemed to surround us. At the peak, a treetop poked its dead branches through the sand by our shoes.
For fifteen miles along the coast of Lake Michigan, stuck between a U.S. Steel Plant and Michigan City, Indiana Dunes provides habitats for birds and plants, as well as 50 miles of trails for walkers like us. Established in 1966 as a National Lakeshore, it has now been designated a National Park. The area had been logged in the early 1800s and industry moved nearby at the turn of the 20th century. Sand dunes that once extended much farther than this 15-mile stretch were flattened by houses and power plants, causing erosion, wetland drainage, and the loss of many species. The dunes themselves swallow the forest at the rate of several feet per year.
We slid and hunched our way down the steep dune towards the lake, letting the small curving waves overlap each other and break on sandaled feet. Gulls perched on what I first thought was driftwood, but quickly realized was the scattered bones of some mysterious animal, too small to be a deer, too large to be a coyote. Chicago loomed on the horizon and the breeze chilled us even in late May. To the east, a power plant chugged white billows of steam into the atmosphere. To the west was the fence of a residential beach community built in the midst of the park itself.
Though born and raised in the Rust Belt her whole life, my companion burst into tears. “Is this it? Is this what we are left with? Flowers in the dust?” I made a few doubtful explanations, but I had recently visited the Grand Canyon, and it was difficult not to compare. The Indiana Dunes was not an image of “unspoiled nature,” of “wilderness,” of what we imagined to be a “national treasure.” How could we reconcile this compromised, hemmed-in space with the sublime views on the covers of magazines and tourist brochures? How could we reconcile this with the ideal?
Author and conservationist David K. Leff provides a method to confront this apparent problem with his philosophy and practice of terranexus. Rather than pining for a shrinking wilderness, he urges us to embrace the unavoidable and sometimes messy blend of nature and culture. The places to find beauty and solace could be grass-covered landfills, vine-choked old factories, or wood lots nestled in-between suburban developments.
“To be fully aware of and appreciate this world, our attachment must extend to working landscapes of farm and forest which provide food and fiber and offer a rich patchwork of trees, pasture, and cropland,” he writes. “It must embrace historic colonial towns with their broad greens, and nineteenth-century mill villages with their fortress-like factories. It needs to include city neighborhoods, commercial and industrial districts, both those that are well maintained and those suffering neglect.” To see only those landscapes that please us, he continues, “Is to inhabit a Disneyland of our own making.”
Leff himself worked his whole life to protect natural space in his home state of Connecticut, including negotiating the largest land acquisition in state history. And yet, he lived in a former mill town, and his favorite spot was not deep in the woods, but at an old dam site, full of graffitied concrete and red-brick surfaces. For him, the trout-heavy river and the overhanging willow trees were beautiful, even more beautiful, in the context of the abandoned factory buildings that surrounded them. He offers this idea of beauty being located at the nexus of nature and culture as one way to encourage more people in more places to pay attention to and to preserve their homes.
“We can talk about the magnificence of distant regions,” Leff writes. “But we will be most effective if we start generating more interest in familiar spots, like Aldo Leopold did for his beloved patch of tired sand county.”
Unfortunately, some leaders of the current environmental movements consciously or unconsciously leave these “tired” places out of their campaigns, and certainly out of their shiny branding. If they are included, it is only to “save” them from neglect and further degradation, inadvertently devaluing them in a quest to give them future value. It has been common practice for a half century now to hold tightly to a wilderness ideal in an attempt to protect the last lands free of human infiltration. And there is undoubtedly value in that way of thinking. But by ignoring the messy spaces of human-nature interaction, we leave out the vast majority of those interactions. For how many days of my life did I enjoy the Grand Canyon? A small fraction of the days in which I have enjoyed third-growth thickets littered with metal rebar, choked with invasive knotweed, and polluted with the scent of nearby gas stations.
The practice of terranexus is slightly different from finding beauty in urban spaces. Urban and even suburban civilization has plenty to recommend it. We can find noble symmetry in the lines of architecture, sublime action in the flow of automobiles, coherent harmony in the cheers of a crowd. Detroit or Cleveland or Chicago seen from a high apartment window at night is undeniably beautiful, even to many hardened environmentalists. But with a little more effort, we might also enjoy the harsh commercial lighting of a parking lot or the sound of honking car horns. Similarly, while the idyllic pastoral areas pictured in our minds’ eye have pleased every poet since the agricultural revolution began, the pungent smell of cow dung and the rusting tractor dumped in a gravel gully are not always part of that vision.
However, we might consider that these gullies and parking lots are the very places where most of us learned to love nature. I grew up in the shadow of a dead-end highway spur outside of Reading, Pennsylvania and spent a good part of my childhood playing in an ever-shrinking cornfield that is now a suburban development. Trails led me into small patches of boggy woodlands where one lonely sumac tree hung over the cracked concrete of the abandoned road. I found both adventure and wonder in the swamp created by an overflow pipe and the rocky cliff crafted by dynamite rather than glaciers. So, why should I have a problem appreciating the slightly broader expanse of Indiana Dunes? Its problematic synthesis resembles most those places where I began to appreciate the natural world.
If we are going to care about the environment and preserve natural spaces in the so-called “rust belt,” then we must love rust. We must practice terranexus and accept and even love the chaotic intersection of civilized and natural worlds. We must love the abandoned quarry that borders a favorite state park and love the giant hump of moss-covered macadam that stands sentinel over a stream near home. We must appreciate the natural and half-natural places we see every day, whatever their apparent aesthetic or value. Only then can we begin to treat all of the earth – not just the picture-perfect national parks – with attention and respect.
On that far-off day at Indiana Dunes, my disillusioned companion and I retired to the State Park campsite, brushing off the sand-blasted slats of the picnic table and setting out mass-produced plates and cups. While we boiled dried spaghetti and hot cocoa, the sun set, casting a shadow toward us from the concrete block of restrooms and showers. We spooned up heaps of soggy pasta and began to eat when a herd of deer walked tentatively through the nearby trees. Stopping a few yards away, they stared at us with curiosity and fear, probably expecting handouts. After taking photos, we shooed them away with gentle waves.
Later, in the middle of the night, the deer returned and sniffed around the small plastic tent. I woke and crawled outside. The animals bounded into the night, and I stood a while in the darkness. Wind howled across Lake Michigan into my ears, obscuring the rushing noise of cars on Highway 94. Turning on my flashlight, I looked down the row of identical campsites, at the trash cans and the firepits, and then shone the light on a small prickly pear cactus at the edge of the woods.
I remember very clearly thinking that it was all so beautiful.
Eric D. Lehman is the author or editor of over twenty books, including New England at 400, The Quotable New Englander, A History of Connecticut Food, Literary Connecticut, A History of Connecticut Wine, Bridgeport: Tales from the Park City, Hamden: Tales from the Sleeping Giant, Insiders’ Guide to Connecticut, The Foundation of Summer, Connecticut Town Greens, and Afoot in Connecticut: Journeys in Natural History, nominated for the Pushcart Prize.
