Into our dark, rich soil we placed the fertilizers, eliminating the need for the fields of alfalfa to rest the earth. Into our dark, rich soil we placed the herbicides, eliminating the need for the carloads of high school students earning summer money by pulling the weeds from the corn, tending the crops that would fill their plates in winter. Into our dark, rich soil we placed the hybrid seeds, eliminating the rows of waving seven-foot-tall corn, replacing them with shorter stalks, more ears, denser rows—increasing the yield, decreasing the prices. The story is familiar. Rachel Carson told it well. Lick the tip of your finger, and on your tongue you will find many chemicals developed since World War II, most of which we know very little about.
It is was when writing about the dark, rich soil of Illinois that I found tears in my eyes. “There is no more topsoil in Kansas,” my neighbor tells me. Hearing that there are twenty thousand insects for every square foot of soil cheers me up. There they are engorging, aerating, resuscitating the earth. I’m not really a lover of insects, but the idea that some species takes soil seriously makes me happy.
Place your bare feet on the earth. Feel the ground beneath you. Know the connection.
Read aloud, or write and speak your own story about soil.
Underlying Patterns: A Bioregional Approach
Place is security, space is freedom: we are attached to the one and long for the other…. What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.
—Yi-Fu Tuan, Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience
A bioregional approach merges nature and culture; humans are considered part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. A bioregion is generally defined as an area with biological integrity, including all interacting life forms. Environmental educator John Elder elaborates, describing a bioregion as a naturally defined landscape, comprehensive in both topographical and biological ways and also in the way it includes human culture. The resulting permeable boundaries may have little relationship to political borders and can be viewed on various scales from local to global. Dynamic edge zones, called ecotones, result where one bioregion overlaps another, creating particularly rich habitats that support life from both regions.
To know your bioregion, it is useful to identify specific characteristics used to determine bioregional boundaries. We begin with a geological overview, reflecting the movement of tectonic plates and the volcanic and glacial activity that has shaped the terrain and waterways, influencing soil types. We also consider the resulting changes in climatic and atmospheric conditions, such as temperature and weather patterns. We then look at plants and animals, flora and fauna, and the ways they have altered with the arrival of humans. We reflect on the first Paleo-Indians, later migrations, and population centers. As we study agriculture, forestation, and industrialization practices, we can also consider prevailing religious, scientific, and cultural attitudes that affect stewardship of place. In other words, we look at soil and landforms, air, water, plants, and animals, including humans.
Canoe by Stephen Keith. Photograph copyright© Benjamin Mendlowitz.
NATURE AND CULTURE
My dance studio at the college has one wall of Vermont granite—metamorphosed limestone from warm, ancient seas. The floor is maple, cut in Vermont forests; the light-hued ceiling is pine. The piano, with its ebony veneer, reflects distant lands. I am aware at every moment of all that supports the body, gesture by gesture. Zen centers in Japan were modeled from ancient barns; this room reflects both. The dark-stained floor reminds us of simplicity, encourages us to touch our foreheads to the earth again and again. Conversing in this space, I ask a dance student what part of the country she might choose for graduate studies. She responds that place is not important. But I disagree. The landscape shapes who we are and whom we will become. These rooms, these floors, the mountainous horizon through the window are now part of everything she does. Each swoop of her arm holds a history of this room where we stand.
Barn reconstruction for Bramble Hill Farm, Amherst, Massachusetts. Frame isometric by Tris Metcalfe, architect.
For practice in developing a bioregional perspective we will focus on Middlebury, Vermont, the home landscape of this text. Middlebury is part of the Champlain bioregion, one of six major regions in Vermont. Flanked on the west and east by the Adirondack Mountains and Green Mountains, respectively, the town is nestled in the fertile Champlain lowlands adjacent to nearby Lake Champlain, giving this area a four-weeks-longer growing season than that of the mountains of southern Vermont. The Champlain bioregion is part of the larger Greater Laurentian bioregion, which includes most of New England and extends north into Canada.
Geological history shaped the patterns that contour our contemporary landscape.1 The Grenville orogeny is considered the first major mountain-building era of the Appalachian chain, occurring 1.3 to 1.1 billion years ago (bya). Geological records suggest that the oceanic crust bordering the eastern coast of a much smaller North American continent slid into the earth’s interior, in a process called subduction. As the continental plates, moving with convection currents from the planet’s internal heat, slowly collided, they created a lofty mountain range (comparable in height to the Himalayas)—the ancestral Adirondacks, which covered New York and Vermont.
You can touch rocks from the Grenville era today in the spine of the southern Green Mountains (Killington and Pico peaks) and the basement layer of the Adirondacks, although the mountains themselves gradually eroded and disappeared over hundreds of millions of years. The still-jagged Adirondack Mountains visible today are thought to have been formed from a geological “hot spot,” erupting under the crust around 2 million years ago and followed by erosion. Thus, they are considered “young” mountains in geological time.
Around 590–550 million years ago, Vermont was near the equator, partially submerged under tropical waters, with a hot and steamy climate. No flora or fauna had yet moved onto land. Three collisions between the North American plate and the African plate occurred between 590 and 250 million years ago, shaping and reshaping the land and endowing this bioregion with its present contours.2 The first collision, known as the Taconic orogeny, occurred around 450 (470–450) million years ago. Convection currents in the earth’s mantle reversed and began to close the proto-Atlantic Ocean, causing an underthrusting of the coastal slab. Shoving coastal rock inland, the collision upfolded another majestic north-south-trending mountain range, now called the Berkshire Hills and Taconic Mountains. This period created most of the dominant mountains in Vermont.
The second collision, the Acadian orogeny, occurred around 400 (450–345) million years ago, as land masses again collided, refolding the Green Mountains. A part of the crust from the proto-Africa plate, which had rafted out through the oceanic crust and had formed a micro-continent called Avalon, eventually collided with proto-North America.3 After the collision, as convection currents reversed, the continents separated and this part of Africa was left behind, newly attached to Vermont. If this geologic story is correct, New Hampshire and eastern New England were once African soil. Around 320 (345–280) million years ago, the final collision between the North American and African plates resulted in the Alleghenian orogeny, primarily affecting the formation of the Appalachian Mountains in the southern United States. Together, these mountain-building events—the Grenville, Taconian, Acadian, and Alleghenian orogenies—formed the Appalachian chain, extending from Quebec to Georgia. The elegant peaks were ground down by erosion and glaciation into the landscape we know, including the pastoral contours of the 350-million-year-old Green Mountains of Vermont.
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